Sex and Sexuality in China

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Sex and Sexuality in China explores issues of sex and sexuality in a non-western context by examining debates surrounding the emergence of new sexual behaviours, and the appropriate nature of their regulation, in the People’s Republic of China. Commissioned from Western and mainland Chinese scholars of sex and sexuality in China, the chapters in this volume are marked by a diversity of subject materials and theoretical perspectives, but turn on three related concerns. First, the book situates China’s changing sexual culture, and the nature of its governance, in the socio-political history of the PRC. Second, it shows how China’s shift to a rule of law has generated conflicting conceptions of citizenship and the associated rights of individuals as sexual citizens. Finally, the book demonstrates that the Chinese state does not operate strictly to repress ‘sex’; it also is implicated in the creation of new spaces for sexual entrepreneurship, expertise and consumption. With contributions from leading China scholars in the West and mainland China, Sex and Sexuality in China offers a comprehensive and highly topical account of China’s current landscape. The volume will be of interest to area specialists in China and East Asia, to those concerned with post-socialist societies, and to the huge interdisciplinary field of sexuality studies.

Elaine Jeffreys lectures in China studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the author of China, Sex and Prostitution (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). Routledge Studies on China in Transition Series Editor: David S. G. Goodman

1 The Democratisation of China 15 Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Baogang He China 2 Beyond Beijing The search for national identity under Dali Yang reform Yingjie Guo 3 China’s Enterprise Reform Changing state society relations after Mao 16 Elite Dualism and Leadership Selection You Ji in China Xiaowei Zang 4 Industrial Change in China Economic restructuring and conflicting 17 Chinese Intellectuals Between State and interests Market Kate Hannan Edward Gu and Merle Goldman 5 The Entrepreneurial State in China 18 China, Sex and Prostitution Real estate and commerce departments in Elaine Jeffreys reform era Tianjin 19 The Development of China’s Jane Duckett Stockmarket, 1984–2002 6 Tourism and Modernity in China Equity politics and market institutions Tim Oakes Stephen Green 7 Cities in Post Mao China 20 China’s Rational Entrepreneurs Recipes for economic development in the The development of the new private reform era business sector Jae Ho Chung Barbara Krug 8 China’s Spatial Economic Development 21 China’s Scientific Elite Regional transformation in the lower Cong Cao Yangzi delta 22 Locating China Andrew M Marton Jing Wang 9 Regional Development in China 23 State and Laid-Off Workers in Reform States, globalization and inequality China Yehua Dennis Wei The silence and collective action of the 10 Grassroots Charisma retrenched Four local leaders in China Yongshun Cai Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming 24 Translocal China 11 The Chinese Legal System Linkages, identities and the reimaging of Globalization and local legal culture space Pitman B Potter Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein 12 Transforming Rural China 25 International Aid and China’s How local institutions shape property Environment rights in China Taming the yellow dragon Chi-Jou Jay Chen Katherine Morton 13 Negotiating Ethnicity in China 26 Sex and Sexuality in China Citizenship as a response to the state Elaine Jeffreys Chih-yu Shih 14 Manager Empowerment in China Political implications of rural industrialisation in the reform era Ray Yep Sex and Sexuality in China

Edited by Elaine Jeffreys First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library,2007. “To purchaseyourown copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2006 Elaine Jeffreys, selection and editorial matter; the contributors, their own chapters All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-96706-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-40143-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-40143-2 (hbk) Contents

Contributors vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 1 ELAINE JEFFREYS 1 Transformations in the primary life cycle: the origins 21 and nature of China’s sexual revolution PAN SUIMING 2 Sex, politics and the policing of virtue in the People’s 43 Republic of China GARY SIGLEY 3 Contesting citizenship: marriage and divorce in the 62 People’s Republic of China MARGARET Y.K. WOO 4 Regulating male same-sex relationships in the People’s 82 Republic of China LI YINHE 5 Sexual citizenship and the politics of sexual storytelling 102 among Chinese youth JAMES FARRER 6 Selling sexual health: China’s emerging sex shop 124 industry JO McMILLAN 7 Female sex sellers and public policy in the People’s 139 Republic of China ZHANG HEQING 8 Debating the legal regulation of sex-related bribery 159 and corruption in the People’s Republic of China ELAINE JEFFREYS Index 179 Contributors

James Farrer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is the author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform (2002) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, an ethnography of youth dating, romance and sexual culture in 1990s Shanghai. His recent research focuses on sexual storytelling, ethical rhetoric in everyday life and intercultural and international intimacies in urban China and Japan. Elaine Jeffreys lectures in China studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. Recent publications include China, Sex and Prostitution (2004) London, New York: RoutledgeCurzon; and ‘Feminist prostitution debates: are there any sex workers in China?’ (2004) in Anne McLaren (ed.), Chinese Women: Living and Working, RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 165–211. She is currently working on a text that examines the legal regulation of new sexual behaviours in the People’s Republic of China. Li Yinhe is a Professor and senior researcher at the Department of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is widely acknowledged as China’s foremost female scholar on sex-related issues, having published extensively on the subjects of male homosexuality and female sexuality. Some of her most well-known publications are (2001) Fuke yu xing [Foucault and Sex], Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe; (1998) Zhongguo nüxing de ganqing yu xing [Love and Sexuality of Chinese Women], Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe; and (1998) Tongxinglian yawenhua [Homosexual Subculture], Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe. Joanna McMillan is a freelance writer specializing in Chinese social issues. She is the author of Sex, Science and Morality in China (2006) London, New York: Routledge, a critique of how sex is thought and talked about in China today. Jo is currently writing a fictionalized account of her research adventures in China and travelling in Southeast Asia. Pan Suiming is Professor and Director of the Institute for Research on Sexuality and Gender at the Renmin (People’s) University of China, Beijing. He is widely acknowledged as one of China’s foremost scholars on issues of sex and sexuality. Recent publications include Pan Suiming, William Parish, Wang Aili and Edward Lauman (2004) Dangdai Zhongguoren de xing xingwei Contributors vii yu xing guanxi [Sexual Behaviour and Relations in Contemporary China], Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe; and Pan Suiming and Yang Rui (2004) Xing’ai shinian: quanguo daxuesheng xing xingwei de zhuizong diaocha [Ten Years of Sex and Love: A Survey of the Sexual Behaviours of Chinese University Students], Beijing: shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe. Gary Sigley is a lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia. His research interests centre on governmental reasoning and practice in contemporary China. Gary has recently published an article on Chinese authoritarian governmentality and population planning under the title ‘Liberal despotism’ in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. A book on the discourse of population in modern China titled Governing Chinese Bodies: Reproduction and Citizenship from Plan to Market is forthcoming. Margaret Y. K. Woo is Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, USA. She was formerly a Fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and presently, an Associate in Research at East Asian Legal Studies Center of Harvard Law School and the Fairbank Center of Harvard College. Professor Woo has published and spoken widely on China’s legal reforms. She is the co-editor of (2003) East Asian Law – Universal Norms and Local Cultures (London: RoutledgeCurzon), a collection of interdisciplinary studies on the competing tensions of global/local forces on East Asian identities and legal systems. She is also the co-author of American Civil Litigation (New York: Aspen Publishers, forthcoming). She is currently working on a joint study with a group of legal scholars from Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing, China. This study collected empirical data from the Chinese courts and is one of the first systematic studies of current Chinese legal reforms. Zhang Heqing is an Associate Professor and the Deputy Director of the Department of Social Work at Yunnan University. He is the author of Ruoshi qunti shengyin yu shehui gongzuo jieru [Subaltern Voices and Activist Social Work] (2002) Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe. Acknowledgements

Discussion of a potential volume on issues of sex and sexuality in the People’s Republic of China began as a casual conversation between Gary Sigley and I regarding the general paucity of edited texts on the subject matter in English, and the need to involve Chinese-language contributors in a proposed volume, given the burgeoning nature of sexuality studies in mainland China and relative ignorance of those studies outside of a specialized China studies readership in the West. We were both delighted by the enthusiasm this idea generated, and I would like to thank all of the contributors for their willingness to be involved and their dedication to the project. Special thanks are due to Pan Suiming and Li Yinhe, both of whom are scholars of considerable standing in China. I would also like to thank Sara Danru Zhang, from the Institute for International Studies (IIS) at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), for invaluable research assistance and help with translating the Chinese-language contributions by Li Yinhe, Pan Suiming and Zhang Heqing; Gary Sigley, from the University of Western Australia, for working on the initial translation of the chapter by Li Yinhe; Ivan Roberts, for proofreading various chapters and formatting the figures and tables that appear in the contribution by Pan Suiming; Wayne Peake, the Research and Records Coordinator at the IIS, UTS, for proofreading the draft volume; and UTS for research funding in 2003. Finally, I would like to thank Professor David S.G. Goodman for his ongoing intellectual and collegial support. Sections of the chapter by Margaret Y.K. Woo were published in M.Y.K. Woo (2003) ‘Shaping citizenship: Chinese family law and women’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 15: 75–110. The author and the publishers would like to thank YJLF for allowing us to reproduce those sections here. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book. Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China

Elaine Jeffreys

In an article entitled ‘Talking sex’, Dennis Altman (2000: 171–8) contends that the truly radical impetus of postcolonial and cultural studies lies in the attention both fields have shown towards issues of sex and sexuality. However, Altman proceeds to qualify this claim by arguing that the problem with queer theory is that it has failed to imagine itself outside of the ‘Iron Triangle’ of London, Paris and New York (ibid.: 176). The ‘development of genuinely new regimes of sexuality and gender’, he continues, ‘seems more likely to emerge from Rio, Manila and Soweto than the hyper-academicised hothouses of western theory’ (ibid.). The point to note, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2001: 669) explain, is that Western studies of sexuality have tended to replicate the tradition/ modernity divide, by reifying Euramerica as the site of modern, progressive social movements, while other parts of the world are presumed to be traditional and oppressive, especially with regards to sex and sexuality. Such studies have thus failed to consider how different nation-states, forms of governmentality, economic formations, and consumer cultures, produce and uphold diverse sexual subjectivities and communities in an increasingly globalized world (ibid.: 663–79). The tendency of Western studies of sexuality to reify Euramerica as a unified site of ‘modern freedoms’ owes much to the apparent and perceived lack of sexual rights in many developing countries. The NGOization of social movements – in the form of ‘the emergence of global feminism as a policy and activist area’; struggles by gay, lesbian and other activists; and the imperatives of HIV/AIDS prevention programs – has seen the extension of Western liberal conceptions of human rights to the rest of the world (ibid.: 665). Although some postcolonial theorists have criticized the neo-colonialist implications of this particular form of globalization, for valorizing Western-style sexual liberation as the ‘only possible progressive trajectory’, and for constructing universal and potentially oppressive Feminist and Gay subjects, such criticisms tend ultimately to be rejected on the grounds that they sound too close to arguments against a universal respect for human rights, and therefore offer succour to traditional and repressive regimes (e.g. Altman 2000: 174). Queer theorists similarly wind up advocating the globalization of Euramerican sexual politics, both because of and in spite of their Foucauldian allegiances. Conventional histories of sexuality posit a standard trajectory: an original period 2 Elaine Jeffreys of ‘natural’ openness was followed by a chronicle of increasing repression that culminated in the constraints of the puritanical Victorian era (where sex was confined to marriage for the purposes of procreation), constraints that we are only now beginning to throw off (Edelman 1994; Weeks 1985). Michel Foucault (1978) challenges this ‘repressive hypothesis’ by showing how the very ‘putting of sex into discourse’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a proliferation of sexual identities (albeit pathologized ones), and encouraged us to speak out about sexuality as both the truth of ourselves, and an act of courage against oppression. Hence gay, lesbian and queer theorists have variously illustrated how the institutionalization of heterosexuality functions to produce and marginalize ‘other sexual subjects’, thereby prompting calls for liberal law reform to reject the ‘sex-negative’ attitudes that underpin the legal regulation of so-called deviant sexual conduct (Hocquenghem 1993 [1972]; Rubin 1984: 3–31). An evident problem here is that the continued appeal of queer theorists to notions of sex-negativity and the transgressive nature of ‘doing the forbidden’ tends to reinstate the (most unFoucauldian) repressive hypothesis. It implies that what mainstream society perceives as perverse sexual acts, while not exactly referring to fixed or innate sexual identities, exist in a ‘natural’ state of opposition to the assumed repressive and predatory aims of government (Jeffreys 2004: 81). Once activated in non- Western contexts, this appeal inadvertently reinforces perceived differences between policies based on traditional morality and the more enlightened policies of ‘the West’. The tendency of Western studies of sexuality to present Euramerica as a unified site of ‘modern freedoms’ is reiterated in popular commentaries on the emergence of sex as a prominent feature of public life in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Media reports with catchy titles, such as ‘Move over Mao, today’s Chinese revolution is sexual’ (Lynch 2003), routinely relate a narrative that celebrates China’s belated entry on the Long March to global modernity, epitomized by Western-style sexual and political liberation. According to this particular story, sex was open and free in traditional China, but all that stopped when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949. Under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong (1949–1976), sex practically vanished from sight in Chinese culture. The Communist regime enforced a ‘puritanical public morality that regarded individual desire as bourgeois indulgence’, with the result that men and women dressed in androgynous conformity, premarital sex was virtually unknown, and commercial sex was banned (ibid.; Wehrfritz 1996: 8). This situation changed with China’s opening to the West, following the introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and Open Door Policy in December 1978. Now the Chinese too have Western-style dating, a commercial sex industry, radio call-in shows providing sexual advice, and a growing lesbian and gay scene; and, somewhat unfortunately, they are also experiencing some of the same problems as ‘us’ in that crimes such as rape are increasing and sexually transmissible infections (STIs) are spreading rapidly. But the most serious problem, or so popular commentators aver, is that the conservative Chinese Party-state still has to catch up with this positive new climate of sexual openness: just as it places Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 3 restrictions on political freedoms, so too it oppresses individual expressions of sexual rights (Taylor 2004). Scholarly accounts of China’s legal reforms also imply that the PRC has yet to catch up with an idealized conception of liberal post-modernity, epitomized in this instance by the establishment of international markets and a rule of law (for criticisms of these accounts see Potter 2001: 1–3). In keeping with the new governmental rationale of the reform era – the growing conviction that ‘the market economy is a legal-system economy’ – the PRC promulgated its first Criminal Law in January 1980 (Chen 1996: 4). During the Maoist period, the formal legal system fell into disrepute as a tool of class-based oppression and was replaced by the Chinese system of administrative and Party disciplinary sanctions (Starr 2001: 204–19). This latter system, under the auspices of the Chinese public security forces, was used to police the activities of those who were deemed to have committed social offences or political ‘errors’, and has been condemned for encouraging arbitrary and extra-legal forms of punishment (ibid.; Bakken 2003: 128–44). Thus China’s turn to a ‘modern rule of law’ is celebrated as a welcome shift from the now denigrated ‘Maoist rule of man’. But the continued operation of the administrative system alongside the formal legal system in present-day China has also led to accusations that the Chinese Government is reluctant to accord its citizens the rights that are presumed to follow the establishment of rule of law and lead to the creation of a more democratic and equal society (ibid.). Thus, as with criticisms of the CCP’s response to China’s changing sexual culture, critics of China’s legal reforms similarly present the PRC as lagging behind the modern, developed West, and assume that the interests of the Chinese state and the Chinese people are diametrically opposed (e.g. Link 2002). Recent research on the subject of sex in China questions the conventional contention that the act of ‘talking sex in the PRC’ is about testing political limits, and demanding Western-style legal reforms, by highlighting the dependence of such analyses on an assumed opposition between the repressive puritanism of the Maoist era and the seeming liberalization of today (Hershatter 1996: 42–93). Whereas the expatriate scholar, Fangfu Ruan, implies that the greatest repression of sex in world history occurred under the Maoist ‘Party-police-state’ (Ruan and Bullough 1989: 201; Ruan 1991), other scholars proffer a more complicated story. Although critical of the gendered consequences of the CCP’s promotion of monogamous marital heterosexuality, Harriet Evans (1997) notes that an extensive discussion of sexual issues took place in official publications during the 1950s and early 1960s. Gary Sigley (1998: 3–13) adds that this focus did not mean that sex was regarded as ‘unspeakable’ in puritanical fashion, since official discourses paid considerable attention to the role of pleasure in harmonizing marital and family relations. Moreover, contrary to standard claims that the communist repression of sex reached its zenith during the Cultural Revolution, Emily Honig (2003: 143–75) shows that many phenomena which are assumed to be ‘new’ to ‘Open-door China’ – homosexuality, premarital sex, extramarital affairs, pornographic literature, prostitution – also existed in the late Maoist period, even though their specific causes and forms were often quite different (ibid.: 171). 4 Elaine Jeffreys Recent research further challenges suggestions that China is undergoing a sexual revolution because the historical links between sex and politics in the PRC have been severed. As Kathleen Erwin (2000) and Gail Hershatter (1996) variously explain, the emergence of new disciplines in reform-era China, such as sociology, sexology, social work, and law, and the spread of new technologies, in the form of call-in radio, telephone hotlines and internet chat-rooms, have ensured that public discussions of personal and sexual concerns are now more extensive than at any point in the PRC’s history. This ‘openness’ is often read as a sign of the ‘Chinese people’s’ rejection of official state power and former intrusion into the private life of individual citizens. However, both scholars warn that the recent proliferation of discourses on sex and sexuality may not be intrin- sically more liberating than the Maoist-imposed ‘silence’, since such discourses are generally tied to government-led agendas designed to promote modernization and social stability as the basis for prosperity, as well as to ensure the CCP’s ongoing political legitimacy (ibid.). They therefore co-opt Foucault’s innovative contention that talking about sexuality may be neither inherently liberating, nor diametrically opposed to the interests of power, to imply that the recent proliferation of sex-related discourses in the PRC constitutes an extension rather than curtailment of the CCP’s disciplinary power. This book contributes to the critical task of exploring issues of sex and sexuality in non-western contexts by examining debates surrounding the emergence of new sexual behaviours, and the appropriate nature of their regulation, in present-day China. Commissioned from Western and mainland Chinese scholars, the chapters in this volume are marked by a diversity of subject material and theoretical perspectives, but turn on three related concerns. First, the text is concerned to situate China’s changing sexual culture, and the nature of its governance, in the socio-political history of the PRC. Second, it shows how China’s shift to a rule of law has generated conflicting conceptions of citizenship and the associated rights of individuals as sexual citizens. Finally, the text demonstrates that governmental authorities in China do not operate strictly to repress ‘sex’; they also are implicated in the creation of new spaces for sexual entrepreneurship, expertise and consumption. In examining these themes, all of the chapters in this volume highlight the complexities surrounding the emergence and governance of new sexual behaviours and mores in the PRC. Attention to these complexities underscores the existence of tensions between how governmental authorities in China seek to shape the sexual conduct of Chinese citizens and the ways in which that conduct is enacted in practice. But it also demonstrates that the relationship between China’s governmental authorities and new specifications of what constitutes good governance and the appropriate range of individual rights and obligations is not always already conflictual: it is an ongoing process of negotiation and contestation. Therefore future research on the nexus between sex and government in China should be directed towards tracking the continued imbrication between the operations of Chinese government and the formation of new sexual subjectivities, rather than focusing primarily on perceived sites of resistance to official discourses. Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 5

China’s changing sexual culture and the nature of its governance Media reports on the PRC’s latest, i.e. sexual, revolution generally attribute China’s changing sexual culture to the introduction of the Open Door Policy and hence Western influences. According to Amy Braverman (2002): ‘When China opened its doors to international markets in the early 1980s, it inadvertently let in another modern phenomenon – the West’s sexual culture’. Celebrating the belated arrival of ‘Open-door sexuality’, Braverman and other commentators variously cite the work of Western sociologist, William Parish, and mainland Chinese sociologists, Li Yinhe and Liu Dalin, to suggest that ‘China’s sex life will mimic that of Western Europe’ in the not-too-distant future (ibid.; ‘China undergoing sexual revolution’ 2003). In Chapter 1, ‘Transformations in the primary life cycle: the origins and nature of China’s sexual revolution’, Pan Suiming challenges this teleological narrative by arguing that China’s ‘sexual revolution’ is neither a straightforward product of the Open Door policy, nor even of dramatic changes within the nature of sexuality itself. Instead, Pan argues that China’s altered sexual culture is a function of changes within the primary life cycle, a phrase which he uses to describe both the sum of and the relations between the most fundamental of human activities, namely, sex, reproduction, child-rearing, physical sustenance, and the attendant social relations that occur between the two sexes. While some scholars may dismiss this focus as heterosexist, Pan’s point is that heterosexual marriage was and still is a fundamental organizing feature of Chinese society. He further maintains that Western constructions of sexuality, and associated explanations for sexual revolutions, are not always applicable to an examination of the Chinese case, because sexuality in China has not been conceptualized as something that is individualized in the body of the person, either historically or culturally. Pan subsequently traces the origins of China’s sexual revolution to shifts within the relations that make up the primary life cycle. Contrary to popular accounts of these shifts as a sign that individuals in China are finally claiming their ‘natural’ rights to be free from the restrictions of traditional morality and an oppressive state (Kristof 1993: B1, B6), Pan suggests that they owe much to government-led initiatives. The introduction and social acceptance of contraception, flowing from the imperatives of the one-child family policy, has freed Chinese women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy and undermined the former equation of sex with procreation. Concomitantly, non-procreative sexual behaviours that were considered ‘abnormal’, such as auto-eroticism and premarital sex, are gaining social acceptance. Hence Pan concludes that the CCP, whether intentionally or not, has played an important role in promoting a new model of sex for leisure. Pan similarly attributes the growing importance of love in marriage, and rising incidences of divorce, to government-led initiatives. As he explains, love between two individuals was not a prerequisite for marriage in traditional China: marriage was a familial and arranged concern. The CCP broke with this tradition by promulgating the 1950 Marriage Law, which outlawed concubinage and 6 Elaine Jeffreys arranged marriages, thereby promoting free-choice marriage. Whilst noting that traditional marital arrangements have not been abandoned, Pan contends that the growing importance of marital love, combined with the effects of the one- child family policy, has produced new expectations of what constitutes a ‘good’ marriage and associated sexual behaviours. Love and sexual pleasure are now viewed as an essential part of the marital relationship, which partly accounts for China’s growing rate of divorce and extra-marital affairs. Other developments that Pan attributes to China’s sexual revolution are the changing attitudes of young Chinese men and women respectively towards the relationship between love and sex. Recent survey responses indicate that Chinese men under the age of 40 increasingly view sex in a manner that is independent of romantic attachment (Pan Suiming et al. 2004: 422–3). They also are engaging in non-conventional and proscribed sexual behaviours, such as (serial) premarital sex, and consuming pornography and prostitutional sex (ibid.). Given that a standard marker of the Western sexual revolution is the increased capacity of individuals to engage in non-monogamous sexual relations, Pan concludes that the changing sexual behaviours of this particular group of men offers a gendered indication that a sexual revolution is happening in China. While noting that the standard markers of a sexual revolution primarily relate to the behaviours of young Chinese men, Pan argues that the sexual attitudes and behaviours of young Chinese women have altered dramatically when compared to those of previous generations. Media reports often imply that Chinese women are finally embracing Western-style sexual liberation, as evidenced by publications detailing the ‘real-life’ casual sexual adventurism of young, unmarried women (‘Dirty blog has media under fire’ 2003). Pan questions both the impetus of such reports, and the CCP’s historical claim to have liberated Chinese women, by arguing that recent survey responses demonstrate that many traditional assumptions about female sexual behaviour remain unchanged (Pan Suiming et al. 2004: 419–20). The high value placed on female chastity continues to restrict female engagement in sexual relations; and, young married women still feel obliged to meet the sexual demands of their husbands. But, Pan concludes, the fact that young, ‘happily married’ women report feeling forced into having marital sex paradoxically illustrates their new-found awareness of sexual rights. It highlights a growing awareness of the legitimate boundary between consensual and non- consensual sex and that even married women have the right to say ‘No’ (ibid.). Taken as a whole, therefore, Pan’s chapter suggests that the question of who is benefiting from China’s sexual revolution, and the differential gendered effects of that revolution, constitute important avenues of future research. Whereas Pan examines the origins of China’s sexual revolution, Gary Sigley interrogates the CCP’s response to the realities of a rapidly changing sexual culture in Chapter 2, ‘Sex, politics and the policing of virtue in the People’s Republic of China’. Contrary to the assumption that ‘reform and openness’ can be equated with the active retreat of the state from the private domain, Sigley contends that China’s central authorities continue to intervene in the sexual arena due to the historical twinning of concepts of moral virtue with signs of national Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 7 progress in China. When the CCP came to power in 1949, it inherited a devastated economy and a society that was in crisis. Prostitution, venereal diseases and drug addiction were not only rampant, but also had long been construed in nationalist discourse as problems that confirmed China’s inferior status vis-à-vis the West as the ‘sick man of Asia’ (Hershatter 1996: 81–6). Consequently, the apparent success of the new regime in simultaneously re-establishing the economy and eradicating prostitution and venereal diseases from China was heralded as a sign of the political capacity and moral superiority of socialism (Xin and Xiao (eds) 2000). The perceived success of these actions, combined with the introduction of new legislation, such as the 1950 Marriage Law, which promoted more equitable socio-sexual relations, effectively ensured that traditional Confucian concerns with upholding moral virtue, and, subsequently, maintaining social stability, were transmogrified into a new governmental concern with upholding socialist morality in order to guarantee national progress. Therefore, unlike standard accounts of modernity in the West, where ‘progress’ is equated with the gradual loosening of Victorian-style prohibitions on sex, overt governmental intervention into the sexual arena was viewed as desirable in the early decades of the PRC to ensure the successful establishment of New China. As Sigley continues, the equation of socialist morality with civilizational progress in the founding years of the PRC meant that law and official discourse combined to frame the heterosexual marital unit as the normal place for the practice of sexual relations. Unlike Frank Dikötter (1995), Sigley maintains that the continued official conflation of sex with marriage in the PRC does not mean that sex, in quasi-Victorian fashion, remains tied to procreation. There is a considerable body of official literature that aims to ensure that marital sexual relations are pleasurable and mutually satisfying for both parties, chiefly to elicit support for the objectives of the one-child family policy (Sigley 1998: 3–13). But the official conflation of sex with marriage has meant that premarital and homosexual relationships are excluded by default from the forms of legal protection that are offered to the heterosexual marital unit. Moreover, it has ensured that China’s recent turn to law has been accompanied by various attempts to proscribe other forms of sexual behaviour, particularly those with a commercial orientation. Sigley concludes that the increasing gap between the CCP’s vision of how sexual relations should be regulated and how those relations are unfolding in practice makes continued attempts to tie national progress to normative conceptions of sexual morality problematic. In China, as with many other countries, broad sectors of the population support official and legal constructions of the heterosexual marital unit as the basis of a healthy social order. However, a new issue for China’s central authorities, flowing from the spaces generated by the reform process itself, is that many people now contend that practices such as homosexuality and cohabitation should be protected by law, and yet others claim that the Chinese Government should not intrude in the private, sexual affairs of its citizens, even when those affairs are marked by commercial exchange. Thus Sigley points out that recent governmental efforts to ensure a ‘healthy’ social environment by banning commercial sex in China are not only out-of-step 8 Elaine Jeffreys with actual social practice, since pornography is widely consumed and prostitution is widespread, but also are viewed as increasingly problematic because it is recognized that the very policing of commercial sex is generating corruption, social injustice and violating basic freedoms (Pan Suiming et al. 2004: 335–6; Yan 2004). In doing so, Sigley points to the existence of tensions between the CCP’s historical approach to the governance of sex-related issues and new specifications of the legal rights of individuals as citizens in the PRC.

Changing conceptions of citizenship and sexual citizenship In recent years, citizenship has re-emerged as a key, albeit contested, concept in social theory circles. Just as feminist theorists have argued that the concept of citizenship is gender-blind (Lister 1997), so too lesbian, gay and queer theorists have argued that it is sexuality-blind (Weeks 1998: 35–52). These criticisms have resulted in a new body of work concerned with the issue of sexual citizenship. This term refers to the rights granted or denied to various social groups flowing from ‘the state support of reproductive citizenship in order to guarantee population growth through the heterosexual household’ (Richardson and Turner 2001: 337). Thus arguments around sexual citizenship are often couched in terms of analyses of the equal rights claims of various ‘sexual constituencies’, such as gays, bisexuals, sex workers, transvestites, trans-sexuals, and children, and tend to be associated with progressive social and legal developments (Richardson 2000: 105–35) Given the PRC’s recent shift to a rule of law, and the historical tendency of the CCP to conflate sex with marriage and reproduction, it is hardly surprising that arguments concerning the nature of citizenship and individual-cum-sexual rights have begun to surface in the China studies literature (Evans 1997; Keane 2001: 1–17). Discussions of law and development in China tend to assume that the establishment of international markets and rule of law, which endow citizens with rights and obligations, inevitably will lead to the establishment of a more democratic society, and, conversely, to the abandonment of ‘Maoist’ approaches, which were ‘embedded within an authoritarian mode of governance and a collectivist understanding of rights’ (Keane 2001: 3). In Chapter 3, ‘Contesting citizenship: marriage and divorce in the People’s Republic of China’, Margaret Woo calls this modernizing mantra into question with reference to issues of gender, especially the experiences of female divorce litigants. As she explains, the processes of economic reform and modernization are undermining former conceptions of the monogamous, heterosexual marital unit, with an increase in extramarital affairs contributing to China’s growing rate of divorce petitions, an estimated 70 per cent of which are filed by women (Yang and Guo 2000: 522). Concomitantly, Chinese law enforcement is now premised on reduced governmental intervention, reliance on the market to provide legal services, and an increased focus on the individual, in that individuals are encouraged to assert their rights by bringing and proving a case in the courts. While viewing this shift towards a more individualized conception of citizenship as a positive departure from the collectivist and highly Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 9 interventionist ethos of the Maoist period, Woo argues that it can disadvantage women. In line with Pan and Sigley, Woo notes that the CCP attempted to create new and more equitable socio-sexual relations with the introduction of the 1950 Marriage Law. This Law broke with Chinese tradition by outlawing concubinage, and promoted free-choice marriage by abolishing the ‘feudal’ practice of arranged marriages and empowering women to initiate divorce proceedings. In the process, the CCP reformulated the purpose of marriage in accordance with socialist goals and replaced the family as the decision-maker with regard to marital relations. Marriage and divorce subsequently became highly politicized as ‘the state tried to use new family regulations and other incentives to mould a new sort of citizen and the relationship between the family and the state’ (Diamant 2000: 17). This paradoxically meant that divorce was permitted but only granted if there were deemed to be politically ‘proper’ reasons and such requests were mediated through Party-affiliated organizations, rather than through the then discredited legal system (ibid.: 206). With the introduction of market-based economic reforms, China re-instituted a formal legal system and, in the process, provided provisions for divorce on more individualized grounds. According to Woo, the 1980 Marriage Law was one of the first non-economic laws to be implemented during this reform and is significant because Article 25 of that Law provided for divorce on the basis that ‘emotions or mutual affections were broken’. This focused the granting of divorce on the deteriorating relationship between the individual parties, instead of the relationship between the individual and the Party-state; and, when clearer guidelines were introduced in 1989, the divorce rate in China’s large cities soared (Liu 1997). Along with this increase, it became clear that divorced women often ended up without a fair share of housing and property for various structural reasons. Given that the responsibility for bringing and proving a case is now placed on individual litigants, rather than on the Party-state or the ‘fair decision’ of the judge, female divorce litigants are disadvantaged because they often have limited financial resources vis-à-vis men, lawyers in China are few and far between, and legal aid programmes designed to ensure more equitable access to the formal legal system are limited. As Woo explains, these structural problems present serious obstacles to the protection and attainment of women’s rights. Interestingly, Woo concludes that the PRC’s Amended Marriage Law of 2001 provides a possible solution to this dilemma. This Law reverts back to a more moralistic fault-based system with a renewed focus on collectivist mechanisms to protect marriage and family, which are defined as the ‘cell of society’ and the basis of social stability. Article 46 provides for punishment of a party who attempts to conceal joint property to prevent a fair division of property in divorce; it allows a party without fault the right to request compensation from a spouse who has committed bigamy, illegal cohabitation, family violence or desertion; and it brings domestic violence into the realm of the courts (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyinfa 2001). Although this law has been criticized for reflecting the ongoing sexual puritanism of the Chinese Party-state, since it places stipulations 10 Elaine Jeffreys on extramarital sex (Alford 2004), Woo notes that its return to a more collectivist focus is explicitly designed to protect women’s rights. Its promulgation thus hints at the limitations of abstract liberal conceptions of individual rights in that the bearers of those rights are implicitly presented as both equal and male. Whereas Woo questions the masculine bias of the model citizen, in Chapter 4, ‘Regulating male same-sex relationships in the People’s Republic of China’, Li Yinhe argues for the inclusion of homosexual rights in Chinese law. Drawing on interviews with male homosexuals, Li argues that recent changes indicate that it is time to start arguing in favour of the legal acceptance of homosexuality in China. The PRC’s revised Criminal Law of 1997 deleted any specific reference to the crime of hooliganism (Gao 2003), an umbrella term that denotes a wide array of social offences and was often used to penalize those who engaged in same-sex sexual acts. In April 2001, references to same-sex love as denoting a form of mental disorder were removed from Chinese psychiatric texts; and, in April 2000, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security made an announcement suggesting that members of the Chinese public have the right to choose their own sexuality (ibid.). In the latter case, the parents of a woman who was cohabiting with her lesbian lover had asked the Chinese police to intervene and break up the relationship on the grounds that the actions of the couple contravened social morality. After various requests from lower levels of the public security forces to higher levels, it was announced that the Chinese police had no jurisdiction over the case since there were no laws against homosexuality in China (ibid.). But, Li continues, the fact that there are no laws against same-sex sexual acts that occur between consenting adults in the PRC does not mean that there are no constraints on the activities of male homosexuals. In China, as with many other countries, the traditional condemnation of homosexuality, combined with social pressure to marry and procreate, places enormous strain on the lives of those who are erotically inclined to the same sex. Furthermore, the lack of legal protections for homosexual rights in Chinese law means that homosexuals can be penalized arbitrarily on the basis of the Chinese system of administrative and Party disciplinary sanctions. Despite China’s shift to a formal legal system in 1980, the Chinese police have continued to use the administrative system to apprehend and interrogate people for engaging in consensual homosexual acts, generally during the course of police-led ‘strike hard’ campaigns against illegality and criminality. To the extent that they target homosexual behaviour, these campaigns focus on the policing of public spaces where homosexuals are known to congregate, such as public parks and toilet blocks. Although Li argues that the ambiguous status of homosexuality in China underscores the need for protective legislation, her respondents appear to hold two competing views on the subject. One group argue that homosexuality is not and never will be the explicit focus of legal and criminal sanctions in China: they even suggest that China is more tolerant in this regard than many other countries. Rather than facing governmental oppression, they maintain that homosexuals are marginalized in China due to the traditional pressure to marry and procreate, combined with the general lack of publicly available information on homosexuality. Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 11 Proponents of this view see little real benefit in introducing specific legislation designed to protect homosexual rights. Put differently, they do not want to claim a Western-style homosexual identity and ‘come out’: they advocate increased public toleration of homosexuality rather than the legal enshrinement of homosexual rights. Conversely, other members of China’s homosexual community are highly critical of the ambiguous legal status of homosexuality in the PRC and desire formal recognition of homosexual rights. Some contend that China is 100 per cent homophobic and maintain that there is a need for a gay liberation movement, as in the West. However, others argue that legal recognition entails acknowledging the specificities of Chinese history and culture. Specifically, they suggest that arguments in support of homosexual rights should not be couched in terms of libertarian conceptions of the right to sex, since promiscuity should be discouraged, even as safer sexual practices are promoted, and male prostitution and sexual activities with minors should remain proscribed by law. Hence proponents of this view are in favour of extending equal rights to same-sex couples, but in a form that assimilates those rights into a normative heterosexual model, via recognition of equal rights to employment and same-sex marriage. In Chapter 5, ‘Sexual citizenship and the politics of sexual storytelling among Chinese youth’, James Farrer further explores the issue of sexual citizenship by examining changing sexual standards among Chinese youth and associated claims regarding the right to engage in premarital sex. As Farrer notes, official adolescent sex education in China, and consequently school authorities, view youth engagement in premarital sex as problematic and police youth sexuality in ways that would seem intrusive to Western youth. Although sex education is now promoted in Chinese schools as a means to overcome what is described as the formerly harmful ‘feudal’ silence on sex-related matters, Western concepts of sexual liberation and personal freedom are denigrated for encouraging sexual degeneracy (Jia 1996: 12–16). Instead, government authorities promote a ‘scientific’ form of sex education, one that aims to safeguard the physical and psychological vulnerability of Chinese youth. In this context, dating before the age of 18 years is condemned as ‘premature love’ and students are encouraged to subscribe to ‘civilized sexual morality’, a morality that reinforces traditional gender roles by affirming the importance of female chastity. Despite these restrictions, Farrer’s ethnographic research demonstrates that dating is common among Chinese youth and that some students, their parents, and even some government officials, reject the arbitrary imposition of such rules for infringing upon personal freedom and choice. The emergence of competing conceptions of sexual rights in present-day China is underscored by the case of two 19-year-old college students, Ma and Lin, who were expelled in October 2002 from the Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications for engaging in premarital sex (Pan, P. 2003: 1). Ma and Lin were expelled after their relationship came to the attention of education authorities due to Ma’s pregnancy and subsequent abortion. Although other parents have contested such actions informally, Ma’s father made legal history by formally suing the university for violating 12 Elaine Jeffreys her rights to privacy and education (ibid.). As Farrer concludes, this explicit use of rights discourse and concomitant appeal to the courts marks a new awareness of liberal conceptions of citizenship. Moreover, even though the university’s decision was upheld, widespread publicity of the case indicates that the commercial media has begun to work as a new public space for the discussion of sexual citizenship in China. In line with Woo, Farrer demonstrates that China’s new market economy, and the corollary commercialization of previous Party-state functions, has created varying zones of civic participation, with associated rights and protections that depend largely on income. To do so, he cites the example of a marriage introduction service and telephone hotline run by ‘Boss Tang’ ostensibly on behalf of a local street committee government. This hotline justified its existence with reference to official discourses on the need to promote ‘scientific’ sex education, and hired ‘counsellors’ to offer advice on calls about extramarital affairs, sexual satisfaction in marriage, and premarital cohabitation, etc. (see also Erwin 2000: 145–70). However, the counsellors possessed no formal training and simply used the language of everyday conversation and flirtation to keep the callers on the line as long as possible. Further side-stepping ethical considerations, Boss Tang planned to record the details of ‘interesting cases’ and serialize them in a ‘best-selling’ book (e.g. An 1999). In conclusion, Farrer suggests that the commercialization of former Party-state functions is generating a pattern of uneven social controls on sexuality, unevenly distributed resources for self-help, and uneven opportunities for what might be called sexual dissidence. Boss Tang’s hotline may provide a sympathetic hearing for men and women who are involved in extramarital affairs; but it excludes those people who are unable to afford advice and sympathy. Even Ma’s defiance of governmental restraints on premarital sex owed much to her privileged background. Her family had the money required to access the courts and enabled Ma to defy the morality of the university’s ruling by financing her to study overseas. Neither of these privileges accrued to Lin, her former and poorer boyfriend. Likewise, Farrer argues that Chinese youth may be creating new sexual standards by suggesting that premarital sexual affairs are permissible if romantic feelings are involved. However, the very nature of this claim to a normative form of sexual citizenship precludes relationships that seemingly are not based on ‘feelings’. Hence just as China’s economic reforms are creating new and inequitable spaces for public discussions of sex and love, so too the politics of sexual storytelling itself is a process that is constantly producing new outsiders and new forms of resistant narratives.

Selling sex and governing the trade in sex The term ‘sexual citizenship’ refers to claims for rights based on a recognition of the inequalities faced by ‘excluded’ citizens flowing from the institutionalization of (marital) heterosexuality, and, by extension, is often conceptualized in terms of ‘varying degrees of access to a set of rights to sexual expression and sexual Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 13 consumption’ (Richardson 2000: 107). Chinese conceptions of citizenship differ from Western understandings of citizenship in that they are ‘embedded within an authoritarian mode of governance and a collectivist understanding of rights’, rather than being based on notions of the ‘natural’ and ‘inalienable’ rights of the individual (Keane 2001: 3). Nonetheless, as in the West, the subject of citizenship in China is now frequently discussed in terms of consumerism, that is, the perceived rights of citizens as consumers, with identities and lifestyles that are expressed through the purchase of goods, commodities and services (ibid.). Accordingly, discussions of sexual citizenship in the form of arguments concerning the rights of individuals to provide and consume ‘sexual commodities’ – adult goods, prostitution and pornography – have become a topical focus of debate. Many of these discussions are couched in terms of a defence of the rights of the individual to sexual freedom, largely in reaction to the CCP’s historically interventionist approach to the governance of socio-sexual relations. But insofar as there is a story of repression to be told, the role of governmental authorities in present-day China is not quite so straightforward. In Chapter 6, ‘Selling sexual health: China’s emerging sex shop industry’, Jo McMillan highlights the links between China’s central authorities and the creation of new spaces for sexual entrepreneurship and consumption, by charting the expansion of the PRC’s sex shop industry. In February 1993, the Adam and Eve Healthcare Centre in Beijing, a joint venture between the privately owned Beijing Life Guide Service Centre and the state-owned People’s Hospital, opened for business, making history as China’s first official sex shop. The industry has since expanded from urban centres and sex shops can now be found across the country. The spatial organization of such businesses varies. Some are major stores, whereas others are simply walk-in-cubicles on the side of a road; some do a flourishing trade and others are short of business. The costly nature of their products suggests that the industry predominantly serves a monied clientele. Yet the demand for such goods is rising, as evidenced by the establishment of a wholesale market for ‘adult goods’ in 1997. The expansion of China’s sexual healthcare industry demonstrates that the CCP is as implicated in the creation of spaces for sexual entrepreneurship and consumption as it is in the policing of those spaces. McMillan shows that government-led encouragement of private enterprise in the reform era has enabled the creation of the sex shop industry, even though the industry has been subject to regulation from many quarters. Official discourses on the need for ‘scientific’ and ‘civilized’ sex, combined with bans on pornography and restrictions on commercial advertising, ensured that Chinese sex shops sought to achieve legal and political acceptability throughout the 1990s by operating as ‘healthcare centres serving the public interest’. Less erotic emporia than drop-in centres for the sexually dysfunctional, staff in lab coats typically offered medical advice and sold ‘scientific’ aids for the treatment of sexual ‘problems’. McMillan subsequently suggests that market pressures are beginning to push standard medical and social-benefit justifications for the existence of the sexual healthcare industry aside. This argument is highlighted with reference to the goods 14 Elaine Jeffreys produced by the Wenzhou Lover Health Product Company, a Sino–Japanese joint venture, now the largest such manufacturer in China. The company has an active research and development programme, producing devices for practices such as ‘Anal Assault’, which have little clear curative potential. And while the company previously packaged its products in a discrete and plain form, they now adorn their goods with images of naked models and sexual inducements written in English so as to provide a ‘foreign import feel’ for the domestic market. In the process, the notion of ‘progress’, epitomized in an idealized model of the ‘modern West’, has been twinned to official conceptions of ‘science’ and ‘health’ to rationalize a new emphasis on sex toys instead of sex aids, and thus a new emphasis on individual choice and pleasure. McMillan concludes that China’s sex shop industry has become a site where sexual morality and understandings of what constitutes ‘sex’ itself are being reworked. Vibrators and other sex aids may still be sold in a way that adheres to the parameters of official discourse, that is, as tools for ‘social stability’, or products that can ‘help teenagers who want to experiment with sex, cut down on STDs, help stop couples from divorcing [and] reduce the number of rapists’ (Walsh 2002: 39). However, these justifications are being transformed by new conceptions of sexual consumption as relating to choice and desire. The recent entry of bondage gear into the market, packaged as an individualized and appealing form of ‘sexy adornment’ that marks the progress of ‘human civilization’, indicates that sex and sexual morality are increasingly being presented in China as issues of individual choice and private concern, and inappropriate objects of governmental intervention. In Chapter 7, ‘Female sex sellers and public policy in the People’s Republic of China’, Zhang Heqing highlights the existence of new forms of sexual consumption by examining the controversial resurgence of prostitution. Prostitution is a new phenomenon in China in that, following its accession to political power in 1949, the CCP set about eradicating the institution of prostitution, allegedly achieving this goal by the mid 1950s. The extraordinary nature of this feat was upheld as a concrete demonstration of the early regime’s commitment to establishing more equitable socio-sexual relations. Following Engels (1972 [1884]), the CCP insisted that prostitution was a product of the capitalist system of exploitation and reflected the denigrated position of women under that system. The transparent resurgence of prostitution in 1980s China is thus generally understood as being historically coincident with the economic reforms and Open Door Policy. Since then, the CCP has reaffirmed its historical commitment to eradicating prostitution by promulgating new laws that prohibit the institution of prostitution, and by endorsing a series of police-led attempts to crack down on commercial sex in the form of ‘strike hard’ campaigns against criminality and illegality. Nevertheless, prostitution is now widespread. While acknowledging the ‘well-intentioned’ nature of Marxist-based condem- nations of the prostitution industry, Zhang contends that decriminalization is a preferable policy because it will enable women-in-prostitution to become self- employed, thereby freeing them from exploitation at the hands of corrupt police, Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 15 brothel organizers and pimps. Decriminalization as opposed to legalization means retaining government controls over the organization and facilitation of prostitution businesses, whilst removing government restrictions on the prostitution transaction, understood as the straightforward exchange of sex for money between consenting adults (Jeffreys 2004: 70–95). Although such arguments are common in the West, due to the movement for prostitutes’ rights, they are new and controversial in China, with the CCP’s historical objection to the institution of prostitution limiting public discussion of approaches that appear to ‘normalize’ or ‘tolerate’ commercial sex. Writing in his capacity as a social worker, Zhang’s chapter therefore illustrates how members of China’s newly emerging professions are claiming the right to speak as professionals on behalf of disadvantaged groups, and to raise public and governmental awareness of the limitations of certain policies. Zhang further contends that the PRC’s policy of banning prostitution hinders the task of disease prevention. Contrary to popular constructions of women-in- prostitution as vectors of disease, Zhang argues that those who bear the greatest responsibility for prostitution-related disease transmission, namely, male clients, escape both blame and punishment due to the existence of gendered and economic inequalities. The demand for prostitution in China, he argues, predominantly is fuelled by a privileged group of men – government officials and business entrepreneurs. Unlike women-in-prostitution, this group of men can evade punishment for engagement in the prostitution transaction because they do not face the brunt of social condemnation, they have a greater financial capacity to pay police fines, and they frequently have influential connections. As in the West, therefore, the ‘invisible’ nature of male buyers of sex makes it difficult to ascertain the nature of their sexual conduct and the extent to which their consumption practices may be responsible for spreading STIs among broader communities. Hence, Zhang concludes that removing the consensual prostitution transaction from the purview of government would ameliorate the exploitation that is experienced by many women-in-prostitution and facilitate the task of HIV/AIDS prevention (see also Yan 2004). In broaching this conclusion, Zhang appears to replicate the arguments of the prostitutes’ rights movement: he clearly favours decriminalization as a potential means of empowering sex workers by removing the stigma that attaches to their body and person, and liberating them from exploitation at the hands of third parties. But it is important to recognize that the existence of seemingly familiar debates in different cultural contexts may be grounded in different concerns from those in which they were originally formulated. The arguments forwarded by Zhang suggest that domestic criticisms of the PRC’s prostitution policies might owe more to Marxist-cum-Maoist critiques of class-based privilege than liberal conceptions of human-cum-sexual rights. Likewise, it is important to recognize that even though campaigns to strike hard against the prostitution industry have signally failed to eliminate prostitution, their implementation has drawn public attention to the varied nature of what might be loosely called ‘sex-sector consumers’ and ‘sex-sector capitalists’ (Jeffreys 2004: 179). The productive nature of campaign technologies in this context is demonstrated by the fact that the 16 Elaine Jeffreys practice of top-ranking officials accepting ‘sexual’ bribes is now a focus of public controversy. Elaine Jeffreys examines the problematization of the sexual conduct of government officials with reference to the phenomenon of ‘xing huilu’ in Chapter 8, ‘Debating the legal regulation of sex-related bribery and corruption in the People’s Republic of China’. The term ‘xing huilu’ is a recent invention, being attributed to Jin Weidong, a former MA student from the Law Faculty at Nanjing University. In a presentation on ‘Criminal Law Research’ in December 2000, Jin argued that the Chinese criminal code should be amended to criminalize the activities of Party and Government officials who accept or solicit a bribe in the form of sexual services (Dai and Lu 2000). This contention has since attracted media attention due to the perception that this particular form of corruption is increasing. Following the introduction of the PRC’s revised Criminal Law in 1997, a number of high-ranking corruption cases have been tried in the Chinese courts, rather than being handled on the previous basis of internal Party sanctions. The first and most notorious case involving allegations of sexual corruption was that of Zhang Erjiang, the former Secretary of Tianmen City in Hubei Province. In 2002, Zhang was tried for accepting bribes and embezzling public funds. However, in addition to his economic crimes, media reports drew attention to his arguably more serious yet ‘not-punishable’ moral crimes – the fact that Zhang allegedly had abused his public position to have sex with over 100 women. Extrapolating from this and other cases, media reports suggest that more than 95 per cent of high-ranking corrupt officials who accept bribes and embezzle public funds exchange favours for sex, keep a mistress, and hire the services of female prostitutes (ibid.). What members of the Chinese public reputedly want to know is why these corrupt officials have not faced additional legal charges for their involvement in sexual corruption. Despite the existence of public support for the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption, Jeffreys shows that China’s newly emerging group of legal professionals is divided on the issue. One group opposes criminalization on the grounds that sex between consenting adults is a private matter, even when it occurs in the context of corruption. In their view, criminalization is unnecessary because the ethical and sexual conduct of government officials is monitored by the Chinese system of administrative and Party disciplinary sanctions, and this system can be extended to include the phenomenon of sex-related bribery and corruption. Others maintain that arguments based on notions of privacy and mutual consent function to excuse the existence of this phenomenon by portraying it as a ‘life-style’ problem of the propertied classes, rather than a serious social order problem (He (ed.) 2002; Tan 2002). While concurring that individual rights to privacy should be respected, supporters of criminalization contend that their opponents have overlooked the more fundamental right of the Chinese people to ‘know’ that they have an honest and answerable form of government. They further insist that criminalization will promote women’s rights and interests by countering male chauvinism, thereby preventing more women from being turned into sexualized commodities (Pan Zimian 2001). Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 17 As Jeffreys concludes, there is a general agreement that the conduct of government officials in present-day China needs to be made more transparent and accountable, but there is a lack of consensus over how the phenomenon of sex-related bribery and corruption should be regulated. Those who advocate criminalization tend to focus on legal and judicial reform in the name of consolidating China’s shift to a rule of law, while those who oppose criminalization claim that the phenomenon is a moral issue, and therefore an inappropriate target of ‘law’ per se. What contributors to this debate have in common is a focus on demanding compliance and relying on ‘after-the-fact’ punishment, via the extension of punitive administrative sanctions. This emphasis fails to consider educative and other regulatory strategies that seek to equip government officials, like ordinary citizens, with incentives to comply with appropriate forms of sexual conduct. After all, despite accusations that supporters of criminalization are bounded by traditional, moralistic ways of thinking, there is an irony at work in the fact that ‘liberal’ opponents of this proposal are also keen to see the Maoist system of administrative sanctions extended, a system that is often contrasted unfavourably to a ‘rule of law’ on the grounds that it encourages arbitrary, moralistic, and extra-legal forms of punishment. Yet the very existence of this debate is significant: it demonstrates that the act of ‘talking sex and sexuality in the PRC’ is not confined to government intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens; it is also about governing the conduct of those in power. In various ways, all of the chapters in this book point to the utility and limitations of concepts of sexual citizenship in the Chinese context. To begin with, claims for rights based on a recognition of the inequalities faced by citizens ‘excluded’ by the CCP’s historical conflation of sexuality with monogamous heterosexual marriage clearly constitute a productive attempt to liberate human desires and sexual practices from a perceived history of sexual puritanism and Party-state repression. But, as this collection confirms, governmental authorities in present- day China do not operate strictly to repress ‘sex’: they also are implicated in the creation of new spaces for sexual entrepreneurship, expertise, and consumption, and for public discussions of sexual behaviours and mores. In addition, the extension of ‘rights’ claims to include the right to freedom of sexual expression and sexual consumption is problematic because it can wind up advocating the libertarian ideal of total freedom from governmental intrusion into the ‘private’ lives of presumably independent individuals, for which it is far from clear that there exists a popular mandate, either in China or the West. Radical feminists, for instance, reject liberal arguments to the effect that pornography and prostitutional sex are consumed in private and hence do no harm to others, by arguing that what happens in ‘private’ may have wider effects, ‘specifically in the case of male attitudes and behaviour towards women’ (Richardson, D. 2000: 107). The liberal contention that participants in the prostitution transaction are simply individual citizens participating in an unremarkable private transaction is further undermined in the Chinese context by the demonstrated link between the provision of sexual services and the expropriation of public funds. In short, the concept of sexual citizenship usefully questions the institutionalization of heteronormativity 18 Elaine Jeffreys and associated conceptions of the public and private domain. However, future examinations of the nexus between sex and government in China could demonstrate that the concept is limited and may be rendered potentially ‘empty’ due to its predominant focus on individual rights without a commensurate consideration of the ‘other’ aspect of citizenship, namely, social obligations.

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Pan Suiming

Introduction This chapter discusses the origins and nature of China’s sexual revolution with reference to the results of a nationwide survey on sexual behaviours and relationships in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which was conducted by the Institute for Research on Sexuality and Gender at the Renmin (People’s) University in Beijing between August 1999 and August 2000 (Pan et al. 2004). The survey involved 36 investigators and was supported by the Social Science Fund of China; the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, USA; the Population Research Center NORC, University of Chicago, USA; and the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, University of North Carolina, USA. During the course of this survey, we interviewed 3,824 subjects from urban and rural China, including members of the transient labour force who have left their original places of residence (usually rural) to find work in other parts of China (usually urban). Survey results were obtained using procedures adopted in the PRC’s National Census. Seventy-six per cent of the 3,824 interviewees responded. The survey constitutes the most comprehensive study of sexual behaviours and relationships in the PRC to date (for earlier discussions, see Jiang 1995; Li 1999; Liu 1992). Apart from using standard social survey methods, we deployed three innovative strategies. First, we interviewed survey participants at a hotel, usually outside of their normal work hours, rather than interviewing them in their place of residence. Subjects are unlikely to discuss their sexual conduct with investigators in their own home, particularly when their family members are present. We therefore invited subjects to our hotel and conducted the survey on a one-to-one basis, with the investigator being of the same gender as the interviewee. Second, in order to obtain a greater degree of anonymity, the investigator who organized these meetings was different from the investigator who conducted the interview. Third, we conducted the survey using a laptop computer. As demonstrated in the ‘1998 USA Male Adolescent Survey’, ‘computer assisted surveys’ elicit more sensitive data than the ‘fill-in-the-questionnaire’ method (Turner et al. 1998). Using this method, questions appear on the computer screen in a consecutive manner, with the survey participant using the computer keyboard to select the 22 Pan Suiming desired response. Investigators showed participants how to use the computer by first answering non-sensitive data. Once the sensitive questions on ‘sex’ appeared, the survey participant took over control of the computer and the investigator moved out of view of the computer screen. The results of this survey suggest that a sexual revolution, rather than a gradual evolution in sexual behaviours and relationships, is taking place in present-day China. To highlight the existence of a sexual revolution in China, I have tabulated the survey responses in accordance with the five major indicators of changes in the nature of sexuality, as noted by Western scholarship (Reiss 1990: 85–7). These indicators are: (1) the extent of openness or public knowledge of sex; (2) the nature of sexual conduct; (3) the nature of sexual relationships; (4) the sexuality of women; and (5) the status of sex in mainstream society. While scholars concur that these five indicators can be used to measure changes in the nature of sexuality, there is considerable disagreement as to exactly how, and in what way, they combine to constitute a sexual revolution. One evident problem here is that both knowledge of and types of sexual activity have a close correlation with age. Members of the younger generation in China today, for example, are likely to be more sexually active than members of the older generation. Hence it is difficult to ascertain if a ‘revolution’ has taken place simply by comparing the sexual activities of younger and older people at a fixed point in time. To overcome this problem, survey participants were requested to record all of their sexual experiences to date, i.e. we measured the ‘accumulation’ of individual sexual experiences over the course of a life. Using this method, it is possible to compare the sexual activity of younger and older generations. Moreover, it is possible not only to demonstrate that the sexual experiences of members of the younger generation exceeds those of members of the older generation, but also to determine whether or not a shift in sexual behaviours has occurred and to obtain a sense of the extent of that transformation (see Table 1). As Table 1 shows, all the measured indicators of changes in the nature of sexual behaviours and relationships have exhibited dramatic increases over time, except for the rate of female premarital sex. This implies that a sexual revolution is taking place in China today. However, differences within the various indicators – stemming from urban–rural differences, gender differences, and differences in educational level – suggest that this ‘revolution’ is first occurring predominantly in urban areas among relatively young and well-educated males. If we can conclude that a sexual revolution is currently taking place in present- day China, then how do we go about explaining its origins and nature? When discussing the origins of a sexual revolution, Western scholars often refer to the concept of sexuality, understood as an autonomous entity that can serve a variety of social functions in both an independent and direct fashion (e.g. Reiss 1990; Weeks 1985). But this particular mode of conceptualization is not applicable to an examination of the Chinese case. Sexuality in China cannot be conceptualized as an autonomous entity or something that is individualized in the body of the person because, historically speaking, the regulation of sex in China did not aim to control sexuality directly. Consequently, I argue that sexuality in the context of Table 1. Changes in sexual experience

Indicator of Survey indicators or specific survey question Gender Aged 40+ Aged 20 Urban Age group with change to 39 residents greatest response

Group Response

Sexual Knowledge of male and female orgasm and Male 54.2 65.1 67.2 25–29 68.1 knowledge position of clitoris* Female 32.9 47.2 59.6 20–24 66.7 Conjugal sexual Experience of three foreplay types (kissing, Male/ 1.81 2.55 2.71 25–29 2.80 behaviour genital stimulation of partner, sexual arousal female due to genital stimulation from partner)† Experience of four non-traditional sexual positions Male/ 0.81 1.33 1.69 30–34 1.94 (woman on top, doggy style, cunnilingus, female fellatio)† Sexual relations Experience of masturbation‡ Male 45.7 55.2 62.9 25–29 72.2 (premarital) Female 24.1 32.4 37.6 25–29 46.2 Experience of premarital sexual behaviour Male 13.6 17.2 23.1 30–34 34.9 involving other persons‡ Female 4.7 5.4 8.6 30–34 15.9 Sexual relations Experience of more than one sexual partner Male 20.8 28.1 39.0 30–34 45.8 (multiple partners) (including 1.1% of respondents who had Female 5.5 7.1 8.9 30–34 17.7 remarried)‡ Experience of extramarital sexual encounters† Male 15.1 18.6 23.9 30–34 36.0 (including 1.8% of respondents who have Female 6.3 8.4 12.1 30–34 19.4 lived in a de facto relationship for more than 6 months) Trade in sex Experience of exchanging money or gifts for sex‡ Male 7.6 12.5 15.1 25–29 20.6 Experience of buying commercial sexual services‡ Male 6.4 11.3 12.3 25–29 16.7

*On a scale of 1 to 100 with 100 as the highest. †Average number of types/positions experienced. ‡Percentage of total. Adapted from Pan Suiming, Parish, W., Wang Aili and Lauman, E. (2004) Dangdai Zhongguoren de xing xingwei yu xing guanxi [Sexual Behaviour and Relation (sic) in Contemporary China], Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe. 24 Pan Suiming China is better understood as one, unremarkable aspect of the ‘primary life cycle’ (chuji shenghuo quan). This concept refers to both the sum of and the relations between the most basic of human activities, such as sex, reproduction, physical sustenance, and the social and sexual interactions between members of the opposite sex. This chapter first outlines the concept of the primary life cycle and explains its utility for assessing the kinds of transformations that have taken place in the nature of Chinese sexual mores and behaviours since the 1980s. With reference to the survey results, it then demonstrates that the origins of China’s sexual revolution can be traced to five considerations. These are: the increasing separation of sex from reproduction; the challenge posed to traditional conceptions of marriage by the more recent concept of love; the increasing recognition of the significance of sex in marriage; the growing detachment of sexual desire from romantic commitment; and the changed nature of life for women in China today. Following a discussion of each of these considerations in turn, I conclude that China’s sexual revolution is neither a straightforward product of ‘Western influences’, nor even of dramatic changes within the nature of sexuality itself; rather, it stems from the radical changes that have occurred due to the interactions between sex and sexuality and the other component aspects of the primary life cycle.

Conceptualizing sexuality in China: the primary life cycle Sexuality is a key focus of any Western discussion of a sexual revolution, but there is no accepted translation of the English-language term ‘sexuality’ in modern Chinese, even though the term ‘sex’ (xing) is now quite common. In fact, in ancient China, there was no definite term for the biological notion of sex let alone sexuality. The closest terms were se, which refers to sensuality and carnal pleasure, dunlun, which refers to representations of certain movements, and qing, which refers to passion or sentiment. This lack of precise terminology suggests that, in traditional China, just as ren (person) never referred to the individual, but rather was incorporated into jia (family), so too xing (sex) was never an independent category but rather was submerged within a greater social totality. In China today, the English-language term ‘sexuality’ has been variously rendered as xing xianxiang (sexual phenomenon), xing zhuangkuang (sexual state), xing jingyan (sexual experience), and xing suzhi (sexual quality). I myself have coined and tried to popularize the use of the term xing cunzai to refer to the English-language understanding of ‘sexuality’ (Sigley and Jeffreys 1999: 50–8). This is because I think the term xing cunzai can be used to refer to sex not as a natural category, but rather as something that exists and is understood in terms of existing social frameworks, or as something that refers to the nature of the social organization of sexual behaviours in contemporary China. However, as the previously-mentioned translations imply, the term ‘sexuality’ in Chinese is usually conceived of as an extension of the biological notion of sex and emphasizes mani- festations of sex within actual social, cultural, psychological, behavioural, and gendered contexts. Transformations in the primary life cycle 25 The absence of Western-style conceptions of sexuality in pre-sexual revolution China can be illustrated with reference to the dominant principles and associated methods of regulating sexual behaviours that existed prior to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a movement which served as the catalyst for an intellectual and, subsequently, social revolution in China. These principles and methods are encapsulated in the following nine regulatory norms: (1) the understanding that reproduction is the primary objective of sex; (2) the gendered principle that women exist for male pleasure; (3) the notion that sex is a marital obligation and duty; (4) the notion that mutual gratitude and appreciation (fuqi en’ai) are more important in regulating sexual relations than romantic love (langman qing’ai); (5) a general objection to ‘seeking pleasure’ as the qualitative measure of sexual activity; (6) the imposition of quantitative restrictions on sexual activity through the understanding that excessive sex causes exhaustion and harm to male health; (7) the existence of social prohibitions on talk of sex, flowing from the notion that people will engage in sex but they should not talk about it; (8) the existence of social controls on sexual behaviours in the form of fear of gossip concerning the real and imagined sexual behaviours of given individuals; and (9) the existence of age restrictions on sexual conduct based on the understanding that minors and the elderly do not engage in any form of sexual activity. All of these nine regulatory norms refer to sex in relation to marriage, reproduction, health, age, relationships, and so forth, but none of them turns on a clear understanding of sexuality as an independent category. In the context of China, therefore, it is difficult to analyse and assess the nature of the current sexual revolution by presuming that sexuality has an autonomous nature. Instead, China’s sexual revolution is better understood with reference to the concept of the primary life cycle, that is, the totality of the functions and relations between the most fundamental aspects of human activity (see Figure 1). In the context of China, we can say that adult heterosexual sex differs from other human activities insofar as it tends to involve two members of the opposite sex and is traditionally geared towards reproduction and affirming interpersonal relations. This interaction coalesces to form the mainstream social structure. I refer to this interaction as the primary life cycle because, from the viewpoint of the birth and development of the individual (geti), it constitutes the most basic form of society, and it also constitutes the primary ‘unit’ (danyuan) of the mainstream social structure. Examined in this static fashion, the concept of the primary life cycle appears to resemble conventional conceptions of the family. However, it differs from traditional understandings of the family in three main ways. First, the family is conventionally understood and examined as a unified structure; it is first examined as a whole and then broken down into its individual components. In contrast, the concept of the primary life cycle encourages us to look at each of the component activities within the ‘cycle’ and then examine how they interact and what kind of network they form. Put another way, the concept of the family is akin to looking at a house and its structure from the outside, whereas the concept of the primary life cycle encourages us to first examine how the basic 26 Pan Suiming

Figure 1. The primary life cycle. Adapted from Pan Suiming, Parish, W., Wang Aili and Lauman, E. (2004) Dangdai Zhongguoren de xing xingwei yu xing guanxi [Sexual Behaviour and Relation (sic) in Contemporary China], Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.

materials of a house and its structure are assembled, and then consider what they eventually form. Second, the concept of the family implies the cohabitation of a number of individuals within a given space, with the individual constituting the most basic structural unit of the family and the various interpersonal relationships between these individuals making up the focus of the family. In contrast, the concept of the primary life cycle emphasizes both the behaviour of individuals and the consequences of that behaviour. It therefore refers not to the individual per se, but rather to the most basic of human activities and the mutually conditioning effects of those activities. Third, the concept of the family does not necessarily refer to sexual relationships between its individual members. The obvious example here is that of the ‘single parent family’, which is a new and uncommon phenomenon in contemporary China. However, the concept of the primary life cycle takes into consideration the reciprocal influence of the sexuality of two people, even if they are children. The advantage of such an approach becomes evident if we consider that all societies tend to consider sexual maturation as an indication of the social transition from childhood to adulthood. Reference to the concept of the primary life cycle thus enables us to consider the influence of the sexuality of single parents and the sexuality of children. These are considerations that would not be counte- nanced in traditional Chinese accounts of the family, since they tend to view such individuals as essentially ‘sexless’. Transformations in the primary life cycle 27 In sum, the major difference between traditional understandings of the family and the concept of the primary life cycle is that issues of sex and sexuality are always already implicated in the latter. Whereas reference to the concept of the family enables us to conceive of ‘sexuality’ as a relatively autonomous entity, reference to the primary life cycle reveals that ‘sexuality’ is merely a kind of state that is expressed through its interaction with other human activities. This is not to suggest that that the concept of the family is irrelevant, but rather to point out that the concept of the primary life cycle has certain advantages vis-à-vis that of the family, especially when it comes to examining questions of sex and sexuality in China. Reference to the concept of the primary life cycle enables us to better understand the sexual culture of pre-sexual revolution China. The reason why sexuality in traditional China was unable to become an autonomous entity, or something that is individualized in the body of the individual, is precisely because the previously mentioned nine principles and associated methods of regulating sexual behaviours did not seek to control sexuality directly. In effect, these regulatory norms accorded greater significance to all the other component aspects of the primary life cycle than to sex and sexuality. This meant that sex was neither prohibited nor repressed in traditional China; it was simply hidden or concealed. Contrary to conventional accounts of the history of sexuality in China as a history of repression, most historical instances of perceived sexual repression in China flowed neither from popular conceptions of sex as shameful, dirty or ugly, nor from Christian-style understandings of sex as sinful, as was the case in many Western societies. Rather, sex in China, even if it had a slightly autonomous existence and value in itself, remained tied to the mutual or socially based relations within the primary life cycle. Hence sexual activity was not so much repressed as restricted to certain contexts and forms. For example, in contrast to Christian- style proscriptions on the sexual act, sexual activity was actively promoted and encouraged in traditional China so long as it took place within the confines of marriage or for the purposes of producing a heir. It is precisely for this reason that the previously mentioned nine regulatory norms were able to sustain their efficacy for so many centuries. To offer a more recent example, the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976) is generally understood as a time when sex disappeared from the realm of cultural expression in China. In the words of Mayfair Yang (1999: 44): ‘[t]here was a dearth of both public and private discussion of sex during the Cultural Revolution’. However, it bears noting that this disappearance was not the result of prohibition or an order from a leading member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to repress sexuality. The apparent silence on issues of sex and sexuality during this period flowed from the fact that all the elements of the primary life cycle were replaced with the paramount imperative to engage in revolution. The Cultural Revolution focus on class struggle meant that public discussions of sex and romance were considered bourgeois and hence, by implication, taboo. Reference to the primary life cycle alerts us to the fact that China’s current sexual revolution – and associated phenomena such as increased rates of premarital, 28 Pan Suiming extramarital and commercial sex – cannot be explained away as a straightforward product of the introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and Open Door policy in December 1978, and hence as an unwanted effect of ‘Western influences, moral corruption, or loss of social control’. Although Chinese scholars and the Chinese media frequently argue that this is the case, it is necessary to acknowledge that sexuality and other mutually related activities within the traditional Chinese primary life cycle have undergone a radical change, and that this change has a history which predates the reform period, even though it is bound up with the changes that economic reform has brought in tow. Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that the family is not something that is being simply destroyed by China’s changing sexual mores and behaviours; the traditional Chinese family is also being reshaped and reconfigured in diverse ways. In what follows, I will outline the kinds of transformations that have occurred in the organization of the traditional Chinese primary life cycle, and highlight their relation to China’s sexual revolution, commencing with a discussion of the increasing separation of sex from procreation.

From ‘sex for reproduction’ to ‘sex for pleasure’ Historically speaking, the sole purpose of sex in traditional China was defined in terms of producing a male heir to continue the family line. This guiding principle was the foundation and pillar of the then existing primary life cycle and its associated activities. The reproductive orientation of sex in traditional China owed much to the prevalence of ancestor worship and it encouraged conceptions of loyalty and steadfastness in sexual relations and ‘seriousness’ in sexual behaviours. Simplistically speaking, although the Taoist rendition of conjugal skills praised and encouraged a variety of sexual techniques, the Confucian and Buddhist sages of the Chinese past never mentioned any particular method of sexual act. The focus was on ‘sex for procreation’, not ‘sex for pleasure’, a focus which effectively turned women into tools of reproduction. Somewhat ironically, the traditional domination of ‘sex for reproduction’ reached its zenith during the Cultural Revolution. During this period, the concept of romantic love was denigrated as petty-bourgeoisie sentiment and associated with a capitalist, decadent life-style. This condemnation of romantic love had the effect of emphasizing the traditional stress on reproductive-orientated sex, as demonstrated by a popular joke at that time. According to this joke, sex was still permitted so long as it was for the purposes of producing revolutionary successors. The traditional equation of sex with reproduction in China only began to change with the introduction of the one-child family policy in 1981. Commencing in 1981, the Chinese Government started to promote and implement the one-child family policy, first among members of the urban population and then gradually among large parts of the rural population (Croll et al. 1985). At the time (and for a long time after), nobody realized that the introduction of this policy would have a dramatic effect on the nature of sexuality and the organization of the primary life cycle in China. But it completely undermined the traditional equation of sex Transformations in the primary life cycle 29 with procreation. After all, the only reason for married people to maintain a sex life after the birth of a single child is for the purposes of mutual affection and/or pleasure. Consequently, the concept and practice of ‘sex for pleasure’ has emerged and developed in present-day China. Most notably, the introduction of the one-child family policy has severed the traditional link between sex and reproduction, and engendered dramatic changes in the lives of Chinese women. In keeping with the imperatives of the one-child family policy, the Chinese government has been obliged to promote the use of contraception; hence both the use of contraceptive devices and abortion have gained legal and social acceptance. As a result, 49.1 per cent of female survey respondents under the age of 40 who live in urban areas have experienced at least one abortion, and 29.1 per cent of female survey respondents under the age of 40 who live in rural areas have had at least one abortion (see Pan et al. 2004: 100). The government-supported promotion of contraception and abortion has also reduced the fear of pregnancy for many women and, subsequently, helped to improve the quality of the sex-life of many married couples. For example, survey responses show that married women under the age of 45 with knowledge of contraceptive methods are 2.05 times more satisfied with their sex-life than those who fear the possibility of pregnancy (ibid.: 201–5). Concurrently, the legalization and acceptance of contraception and abortion has lessened women’s fears over pregnancy stemming from engagement in non-marital sexual activities. These changes have destroyed the restrictions that were once placed on engagement in non-marital sexual affairs flowing from the fear that such affairs would become public knowledge due to pregnancy and the birth of illegitimate children. Thus women in China are no longer tools of reproduction. Due to the introduction of the one-child family policy, the cycle of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing for urban women has been reduced to a single child in many instances. It is therefore possible for women to devote more time and energy to their sex-life and other activities. At the same time, the reduction of the number of children per family to one child has weakened the position of the most important sex-related activity in the primary life cycle, namely, child-rearing. Reduced incidence of pregnancy has drastically shortened the period of child-rearing co-operation between married couples, prolonged the so-called ‘empty nest’ period, and reduced concerns over children in instances of divorce. Reducing the number of children per family to one child has therefore contributed to China’s growing, albeit still not serious, rate of divorce, and reduced parental concerns over engagement in extramarital sex. Survey responses indicate that while the rate of divorce may be growing in present-day China, it is still not a serious problem since only 2.8 per cent of the survey respondents had divorced and 71.2 per cent of these had remarried (ibid.: 173). Reducing the number of children per family to one child has presumably also reduced the emotional and moral anxiety experienced by parents who engage in extramarital sex. This anxiety is captured in a popular Chinese saying which suggests that people are not scared of the police, their bosses, or even their spouses, knowing about their extramarital affairs, but they are afraid of their children becoming aware of such activities. 30 Pan Suiming The implementation of the one-child family policy has also heralded an increase in the incidence of nuclear families. Survey responses indicate that 85.8 per cent of married people under the age of 45 have nuclear families rather than traditional extended families; with 62.2 per cent of married people between the ages of 25 and 29 having nuclear families (ibid.: 415). Nuclear family arrangements are increasingly common in present-day China, despite the fact that increased life expectancy has increased the burden on the diminishing members of the younger generation who are expected to support and care for their elderly parents, and the resultant effects in terms of lowered income means that young married couples often need the older generation to help financially by looking after their children for them. Nevertheless, 75 per cent of the survey respondents with nuclear families under the age of 35 in urban China indicated that their respective families did not become involved in their domestic problems (ibid.). This suggests that a different form of family has replaced the traditional, patriarchal and clan-based family structure in China. Families in China today are becoming increasingly independent of former social controls on sexual and other behaviours. Since sex is no longer tied to procreation, sexual behaviors that were once considered to be ‘abnormal’ are gaining more social acceptance in present-day China. As the survey responses demonstrate, the number of people who admit experiences of masturbation, premarital sex, adopting unusual sexual positions, and engaging in oral and anal sex, has increased, particularly among members of the younger generation. For example, despite the traditional existence of negative social attitudes towards masturbation, survey responses indicate that 72.2 per cent of men between the ages of 25 and 29 admitted experiences of masturbation, as did 46.2 per cent of women in the same age group (see Table 1). This constitutes a dramatic increase when compared with the figures of 45.7 per cent of men and 24.1 per cent of women aged 40 and over who admitted similar experiences. Moreover, survey responses indicate that 34.9 per cent of men between the ages of 30 and 34 admitted experiences of premarital sex, as did 15.9 per cent of women in the same age group, which constitutes a dramatic increase compared with the figures of 13.6 per cent for men aged 40 and over, and 4.7 per cent for women aged 40 and over (see Table 1). Furthermore, although marriage is still a prevalent institution in China, the traditional obligation to marry and have children appears to be less stringent than in the past. Survey responses indicate that 4.2 per cent of women and 1.3 per cent of men over the age of 30 are single; and that 1.0 per cent of married couples in urban centres had no children (ibid.: 414). This suggests that some people are either marrying late or else remaining single, and that others may be choosing not to have children. In sum, the shift from the traditional conception of ‘sex for procreation’ to a new understanding of ‘sex for pleasure’ has changed the total function of the primary life cycle. It has changed from the traditional model of ‘Man working and acting in the public domain and Woman staying at home and rearing “male children”’ into a new model of sex for leisure. This shift is not simply an effect of Transformations in the primary life cycle 31 China’s Open Door Policy and the introduction of market-based reforms. It owes much to the population explosion that accompanied the Cultural Revolution, flowing from the politically motivated stress on ‘sex for reproduction’. In this sense, the Cultural Revolution is the father and the one-child family policy is the mother of China’s current revolution in sexual mores and behaviours.

The changing relationship between marriage and love In the traditional primary life cycle, the relationship between marriage and love was like the relationship between reproduction and sex, the latter was subordinate to the former. Love in the traditional Chinese sense referred to the notion of ‘favour and gratitude between husband and wife’, with gratitude coming first and love coming second. Gratitude was the precondition of love and also the container and boundary of love. But what exactly was this gratitude and where did it come from? Put simply, it turned on the popular stress on harmonious relationships and the corollary assumption that the only reasonable love is that which ensues from two people who have married, and, in maintaining the primary life cycle, have shown each other mutual favour and owe each other gratitude. Hence, if a man deserted his wife and children and loved another woman, like Chen Shimei, then he would be viewed as ungrateful and condemned by subsequent generations.1 This meant that favour, gratitude and the ensuing love (en’ai) was not focused on emotional communication and spiritual enjoyment, but rather on the more basic task of ‘making a life together’. Harmonious relations were the lubricant necessary to the operation of the entire primary life cycle and love was viewed neither as a personal or private matter, nor as an essential precondition of marriage. Traditional conceptions of love as relating to marital favour and gratitude began to be challenged in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Xu 1997). Starting in approximately the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), Chinese literature began to display a concern with individual love in the form of stories about ‘talented men and beautiful women’ (see McMahon 1995). After the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Western-style conceptions of pure love were also introduced into China. These two different conceptions of love fused into an understanding of romantic love that is quite different from and even opposed to traditional Chinese conceptions of marital favour and gratitude (Pan 1995). Nevertheless, the notion of romantic love has proceeded to establish itself in the Chinese imagination, despite being condemned as ‘petty bourgeoisie sentiment’ during the Cultural Revolution era. The PRC’s Marriage Law of 1980 demonstrates that conceptions of romantic love have replaced the traditional emphasis on love as relating to marital favour and gratitude, at least in theory. This law was the first Marriage Law in China to specify ‘the loss of love’ or ‘an irrevocable breakdown in mutual affections’ (ganqing polie) as grounds for divorce (Quanguo renda 1980; see also the chapter by Woo in this volume). Viewed in this context, romantic love has become not only the first criterion but the sole criterion by which to assess the quality 32 Pan Suiming and value of a marriage. The value of love now surpasses that accorded to the institution of marriage. However, the development of the concept of romantic love in present-day China has outpaced changes in the traditional primary life cycle in many respects. Hence, when the two come into conflict, people tend to follow the organizing principles of the latter. For example, in a recent inheritance case, a certain Ms Zhang applied to be awarded the property of her deceased lover of more than seven years, a man named Huang, in accordance with the stipulations laid out in his will (Yaoqiu jicheng qingfu yichan baisu yong daode duan yichan’an yinfa zhenyi 2002). The case was rejected and the property in question was awarded to Huang’s wife. Two levels of court ruled that, irrespective of the stipulations laid out in Huang’s will, ‘the third party (disanzhe)’ should be excluded from any right of inheritance. This ruling was premised on the understanding that the practice of keeping a ‘second wife’ transgressed social morality and the public interest and therefore the courts should act in the interests of the ‘first’ and ‘legal’ wife. Although this ruling attracted condemnation from some legal scholars for contravening China’s inheritance laws, media reports suggest that it received the support of the general public (ibid.). This consensus reflects the view that extramarital affairs infringe on the essential financial interests of the original primary life cycle more than any other kind of extramarital sexual activity. For the same reason, most people accept that the practice of ‘contracting a concubine, keeping a “second wife”, or hiring a mistress (bao ernai)’ should be made subject to legal penalties in order to prevent familial profits from leaking into other fields. That is to say, they are not prepared to accept that the relationship may be based on genuine love and therefore could be perceived as ‘legitimate’ (‘Bao ernai zai Zhongguo’ 2001; Wu 2002: 39–42). As the preceding examples indicate, romantic love has still not achieved an equal footing with marriage in practice. The survey responses provide further evidence for this contention. Among urban people who married after 1980, only 25.7 per cent met their partners by themselves, with the remaining 74.3 per cent becoming acquainted as the result of a potential marriage introduction from other people (Pan et al. 2004: 163). Among urban people who married after 1990, the number of couples who met independently of a potential marriage introduction only rose to 30.3 per cent of all the married couples that were interviewed (ibid.). These figures suggest that a minority of couples in China practice the minimum condition of romantic love – getting acquainted in an independent fashion – when it comes to marriage. The majority of couples still subscribe to the traditional practice of meeting their marriage partners on the basis of introductions provided by family members or other third parties. But it remains the case that the idea of romantic love is now deeply embedded in the consciousness of young Chinese people. What is more, the PRC’s new Marriage Law actively promotes the importance of love in marriage (see the chapter by Woo in this volume). This growing emphasis on romantic love is generating new configurations of the perceived appropriate nature of marriage and associated sexual behaviours, as the following sections show. Transformations in the primary life cycle 33

The changing relationship between sex and marriage In the traditional primary life cycle, sex was supposed to occur within the confines of marriage. Sex outside of marriage was permitted only if it involved the greater purpose of giving birth to a male child in order to maintain the family line, or was perceived as essential to maintaining the physiological and psychological equilibrium required by the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang. In practice, therefore, the system of one husband and one wife was not practiced uniformly in traditional China. Rather, the system might be more accurately described as incorporating one husband, one wife, several concubines and the services of prostitutes. Nevertheless, sex was supposed to occur within the confines of marriage in traditional China and this prescription became practice in post-1949 China, when the Chinese Communist Party banned the then existing systems of concubinage and prostitution, and promoted the system of monogamous marriage via the implementation of the 1950 Marriage Law. In China today, the historical equation of sex with marriage is being eroded, chiefly due to the weakening of the traditional institution of marriage rather than the widespread adoption of what might be loosely described as Western-style conceptions of ‘free sex’. For example, survey respondents who were urban residents and aged 40 and more years old indicated that they were not overly concerned if their married life involved little display of sexual intimacy (Pan et al. 2004: 253–74). In contrast, survey respondents who were urban residents and under the age of 40 indicated that they would consider an extramarital affair if their married life involved minimal sexual intimacy (ibid.). However, this trend does not indicate that sex has been entirely liberated from its traditional association with marriage. On the contrary, the continued importance of marriage is paradoxically underscored by the recent and increasing practice of ‘contracting a concubine or keeping a mistress’. The recent and increasing practice of ‘keeping a mistress’ paradoxically highlights the continued importance of marriage in China because it constitutes a kind of imitation marriage. To begin with, the emergence of this practice in the early 1990s is historically later than the marked increase in the number of men who engaged in extramarital sex and hired the services of female sex sellers during the mid to late 1980s. The ‘newness’ of this practice thus highlights the continued preference, albeit for a wide range of reasons, for permanent rather than transient sexual relations in present-day China. In addition, the practice of ‘keeping a mistress’ paradoxically underscores the continued importance of marriage because the parties involved generally seek the protection and support that is offered by marriage. Specifically, the involved parties often commence their relationship in the form of a ‘one-night stand’, which then develops into a case of ‘extramarital love’, and subsequently proceeds to the establishment of a second home and relationship, with ‘the third party’ ultimately becoming determined to dismantle the original marriage. As many commentators in China have noted, this cycle has resulted in many tragedies, not least by causing the ‘first wife’ to experience mental and economic suffering (Wu 2002: 39–42). 34 Pan Suiming In short, the survey results do not demonstrate that sex has been separated from the institution of marriage in China, but they do indicate that a new balance is being developed between the two. Survey responses, for example, show that 81.5 per cent of married people under the age of 40 believe that their partners know how to be considerate and caring in their sex life, which is markedly higher than the figure provided by older couples (Pan et al. 2004: 215). These figures indicate that the former combination of a strong marriage with a poor sex life is changing. The fact that this change has flowed from an increase in the intensity of sex within marriage, rather than increased rates of extramarital sex, suggests that sex has acquired more value and significance within the institution of marriage itself. Put another way, China’s sexual revolution is occurring within the context of the activities that make up the primary life cycle, even as it is taking place in forms that mirror the perceived hallmarks of the Western sexual revolution, such as a growing appreciation of what some would call ‘sex for the sake of sex’.

The changing relationship between sex and love In the traditional Chinese primary life cycle, love was defined in terms of favour and gratitude between husband and wife, and the subject of sex was effectively submerged. For instance, traditional Chinese folk tales, such as ‘The Cowherd and the Weaving Maid’, relate the suffering experienced by married couples that are physically separated against their will. However, it is difficult to find any hint that the protagonists experienced any feelings of sexual deprivation. Although the May Fourth Movement of 1919 introduced a Western-style concept of romantic love into China, this concept was tainted by the hypocritical, Victorian-style conceptions of pure love that were imported to China towards the end of the nineteenth century. In consequence, throughout the twentieth century there was a distinction made between romantic love (qing’ai) and sexual love (xing’ai) in the Chinese language, with the former being viewed as more pure than the latter (Pan 1995). The continued devaluing of sexual love in comparison to romantic love in present-day China is apparent in the responses to a ten-year long nationwide survey of the sexuality of Chinese college students, which was conducted between 1991 and 2001. Responses to questions about how people viewed the relationship between sex and love indicated that 64 per cent of the male respondents and 84 per cent of the female respondents disparaged sexual love and believed in romantic love (Pan and Yang 2004: 258). The continued valorization of romantic love over sexual love in China today disguises the fact that sexual love is far more powerful than romantic love in practice. For instance, survey responses indicate that the frequency of sexual orgasm bears little relation to the three factors that are viewed as reflecting the love of a couple, namely, the degree of mutual love, mutual care and daily demonstration of affection. On the contrary, the opposite appears to be the case, particularly among male respondents under the age of 40, and, to a lesser degree, their female counterparts. Not surprisingly, the responses provided by this particular group Transformations in the primary life cycle 35 demonstrate that the less one loves one’s spouse, the more likely one is to engage in extramarital sex. However, the results also show that respondents with the greatest frequency of marital sex and orgasms are the most likely to engage in extramarital sex. Likewise, the responses provided by this particular group indicate that frequent engagement in extramarital sex is accompanied by indifference to one’s spouse but with increased rates of marital sex and orgasm (Pan et al. 2004: 296–332). These results suggest that sex in China has started to be viewed independently of love, particularly for men, which provides another indication, albeit gendered, that a sexual revolution is taking place in present-day China.

The changing attitudes of Chinese women towards sex and love Although survey responses reveal that the measured aspects of a sexual revolution are much lower in relation to Chinese women than they are in relation to Chinese men, this does not mean that female attitudes to sex and sexuality have remained unchanged. On the contrary, when the survey responses are examined across different generations of women, it appears that the indicators of a revolution in sexual mores and behaviours are much higher in members of the younger female generation than they are in members of the older generation (see Table 1). This consideration implies that young Chinese women are experiencing more rapid changes in the nature of their sexual attitudes and experiences than young Chinese men. Not surprisingly, a topical focus of debate in China today is whether women will benefit from a sexual revolution, or, more precisely, the question of which particular group of Chinese women stand to benefit from a sexual revolution and which do not is an ongoing subject of controversy. Gender equality has been a longstanding goal in the PRC and it is generally believed that the position of Chinese women in relation to Chinese men has continued to improve from the establishment of ‘New China’ in 1949 until the present day. Hence recent media reports sometimes imply that young Chinese women in the more open environment of the reform era are beginning to embrace Western-style sexual liberation, as evidenced by the publication of Wei Hui’s sexually explicit text, Shanghai Baby, and the sexually explicit web-diary of Mu Zimei. While attracting praise and condemnation alike, Wei Hui’s account of a sexually active young woman and Muzi Mei’s diary of her many sexual affairs have been read as a sign that young Chinese women are beginning to claim the space for a more autonomous and liberated form of female sexuality (‘Dirty blog has media under fire’ 2003; Wei Hui 1999; see also the chapter by Farrer in this volume). Despite these publicized cases, survey responses demonstrate that Chinese women have yet to realize genuine sexual equality with Chinese men. Contrary to popular conceptions of increased equality, survey responses indicate that many traditional and gendered assumptions about sexual behaviour remain unchanged. For example, it is still assumed that a wife should always be willing to meet the sexual demands of her husband. Survey responses show that young married 36 Pan Suiming women feel that they have been forced into having sex against their will more often than other surveyed groups of women (Pan et al. 2004: 419–20). Additionally, responses from young married women who claim to be in love with their husbands indicate that this particular group of women feel they have been forced into having sex against their will more often than any other surveyed group of women (ibid.). Do these results demonstrate that China still has a long way to go before women achieve sexual equality with men; or, is there another way of interpreting the fact that young married women who are in love with their husbands often feel they have been forced to engage in acts of non-consensual, marital sex? I would argue that, paradoxically, these same findings highlight the changing sexual mores and sexual behaviours of young Chinese women. Without denying the prevalence of domestic violence and other marital problems in present-day China, the higher response from this particular cohort of women may be attributable to the fact that they have a greater sense of self-esteem and a greater awareness of their individual rights than older generations of Chinese women. They therefore have a different conception of what constitutes the legitimate boundary between consensual and non-consensual sex. This new awareness that even married women have the right to say ‘no’ indicates that the sexual attitudes and behaviours of Chinese women are undergoing rapid changes and that Chinese men will have to learn how to accept and accommodate those changes.

Clarifying the role of the primary life cycle: detailed survey results Although the preceding comments relate China’s changing sexual mores and behaviours to transformations in the organization of the primary life cycle, this focus is not meant to imply that economic and social policy considerations are unimportant. The introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and Open Door Policy in December 1978 has clearly contributed to a sexual revolution in China by hastening the collapse of the former system of social control, which was exercised via the work unit and neighbourhood policing system, and by promoting a new demarcation between the public and private spheres. The collapse of former social controls, and the concomitant emergence of new distinctions between the public and private arenas, is evidenced by the fact that Chinese ‘peasants’, who have moved to urban areas to engage in manual work, no longer adhere to the sexually conservative values with which they were once associated, even though their sexual behaviours and mores continue to be more conservative than members of the urban population (Pan et al. 2004: 421; for an alternative, English-language account of ‘peasant’ sexual behaviours, see Friedman 2000: 13–39). Likewise, recent reports in the official Chinese media suggest that some corrupt government officials now engage in extramarital affairs and buy commercial sexual services, despite their professed role as exemplary model leaders of the vanguard party (see the chapter by Jeffreys in this volume). Transformations in the primary life cycle 37 But one of the objectives of the nationwide survey, and subsequently this chapter, was to challenge the routine account of China’s sexual revolution as purely an unwanted consequence of economic reform, hence as a product of ‘Western influences, moral corruption, and loss of social control’, by highlighting the crucial role played by micro-level transformations in the primary life cycle. Accordingly, the survey was constructed on the basis of qualitative variables rather than quantitative ones, with age as the controlling factor. To measure the influence of social factors on China’s changing sexual mores and behaviours, the survey examined variables such as social classes, community cultures and personal sexual scripts. The social class of each respondent was determined by asking questions relating to their educational level, occupation, personal income, residential area when 14 years old, and the occupation of their father. The influence of (sexualized) community culture2 was determined by measuring the number of respondents who had experiences of divorce, premarital sex, going to karaoke- dance venues (i.e. recognized venues for meeting members of the opposite sex in China), multiple sexual partners, watching ‘pornography’, buying sex-related massage services from members of the opposite sex, and buying commercial sexual services. Similarly, the influence of sexual scripts was ascertained by asking respondents about their personal opinions on premarital sex, extramarital sex, sex for pleasure, and whether they thought extramarital affairs should be penalized or not. To measure the influence of transformations in the primary life cycle on China’s changing sexual mores and behaviours, the survey measured a series of variables relating to libido, sexual satisfaction, marriage, and love. The degree of libido was determined by asking respondents questions relating to the intensity of their interest in sex and sexual functions. Sexual satisfaction was measured with reference to the frequency of sexual climaxes and general sense of sexual well-being as recorded by individual respondents. The relationship between marriage and China’s changing sexual mores was assessed by asking questions relating to the perceived compatibility of spouses, the sharing of household tasks, and the incidence of domestic violence. And the importance attributed to the category of love was calculated by asking questions relating to the degree of care, intimacy and depth of love that respondents felt they received from their partners. Only female respondents were asked questions about reproduction, including whether they had experienced anxiety over issues such as pregnancy and abortion. Table 2 and Table 3 compare information designed to gauge the relative influence of social factors and changes in the primary life cycle with information designed to quantify the major indicators of sexual change, namely, questions pertaining to sexual knowledge, conjugal sexual behaviours, and premarital and extramarital sexual behaviours. An additional question relating to the consumption of commercial sexual services was directed at male respondents only. Women were excluded from this category for the simple reason that in China, as in most other countries, the consumption of sexual services is to all intents and purposes a male phenomenon. 38 Pan Suiming The data provided in Table 2 and Table 3 respectively are based solely on survey responses from people living in urban areas aged under 40, since the sexual revolution predominantly has occurred among members of this group. Given that the responses of male and female respondents differ in many respects, the rankings have been represented in gender-specific tables. To facilitate easy reading, these responses are grouped into categories that mirror the factors driving sexual change. As listed above, there are seven factors in the case of men, and eight factors in the case of women. Each factor is given a rank (from one to seven in the case of men, and from one to eight in the case of women), in descending order of importance – i.e. the largest number represents the least influential factor. Table 2 demonstrates that transformations in some of the elements that make up the primary life cycle have had a greater effect on China’s sexual revolution than social factors. For urban men under 40 years of age, social class and community culture – traditionally viewed as the two most important determinants of individual behaviour – are ranked lower than the most other factors in terms of their influence on sexual mores and behaviours. Excluding the category of love, the activities that make up the primary life cycle tend to be relatively more influential than social classes and community cultures in driving changes in sexual mores and behaviour among young, urban Chinese men. Among this particular cohort of respondents, sexual satisfaction is ranked higher than all other factors as a determinant of sexual behaviour, and libido is ranked highest in terms of its effect on the consumption of sexual services. Likewise, the categories pertaining to libido, sexual satisfaction and marriage, are all ranked above social classes and community cultures as influences on sexual knowledge and behaviours, and both libido and marriage exert a greater influence on the experience of multiple sexual partners. Nonetheless, for urban men under 40 years of age, social factors in the sense of community culture appear to play a relatively large influence on the consumption of sexual services. This consideration may reflect the new and variegated development of the sex industry within different communities in China (see the chapter by Zhang Heqing in this volume).

Table 2. Ranking of factors contributing to changing sexual mores and behaviours: male respondents

Impact on indicators Social factors Primary life cycle aspects of sexual change

Social Community Sexual Libido Sexual Marriage Love class script satisfaction

Sexual knowledge 5 6 1 3 2 4 7 Sexual behaviour 5 6 3 4 1 2 7 Multiple partners 4 7 1 3 6 2 5 Trade in sex 7 3 2 1 5 6 4 Table 3. Ranking of factors contributing to changing sexual mores and behaviours: female respondents

Impact on indicators Social factors Primary life cycle aspects of sexual change

Social class Community Sexual script Libido Sexual satisfaction Marriage Love Reproduction

Sexual knowledge 1 6 2 4 3 7 8 5 Sexual behaviour 1 3 5 7 2 8 6 4 Multiple partners 7 4 5 1 2 6 3 8

Adapted from Pan Suiming, Parish, W., Wang Aili and Lauman, E. (2004) Dangdai Zhongguoren de xing xingwei yu xing guanxi [Sexual Behaviour and Relation (sic) in Contemporary China], Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe. 40 Pan Suiming In contrast, Table 3 shows that social class is ranked first in terms of its influence on the sexual knowledge and sexual behaviours of urban Chinese women under the age of 40, but ranked close to last in terms of its influence on their experience of more than one sexual partner. Moreover, unlike their male counterparts, personal sexual scripts play a limited role in influencing the actual sexual behaviours of young Chinese women. Yet libido and sexual satisfaction – the two measurable aspects of the primary life cycle that directly bear on the sexual act – are ranked first and second in terms of their influence on female experiences of more than one sexual partner, surpassing love with a ranking of three, and social class and reproduction which rank last. These results suggest that women’s attitudes towards sex have less influence on their actual sexual behaviours and relationships than more tangible social or primary life cycle factors. Women are still constrained by social considerations in terms of their actual enactment of sexual relationships and behaviours, even though these behaviours are rapidly changing and not as constricted as was formerly believed.

Conclusion China’s sexual revolution is neither a straightforward product of ‘Western influences’, nor even of dramatic changes within the nature of sexuality itself; rather, it stems from the radical changes that have occurred due to the interactions between sex and sexuality and the other component aspects of the primary life cycle. Specifically, the origins of China’s sexual revolution can be traced to five considerations. These are: the increasing separation of sex from procreation; the increasing recognition of the significance of sex in marriage; the growing understanding that love is superior to traditional conceptions of the institution of marriage; the growing freedom of sexual desire from the constraints of romantic feelings, and the generational shift in the nature of female sexuality. As this chapter shows, the varied yet mutually interactive transformation of these relations, in a period of rapid social and political change, has engendered and encouraged a sexual revolution. However, the differences between the data provided in Tables 2 and 3 suggest that future research on China’s sexual revolution could be developed in two direc- tions. First, among the relevant social factors, it appears that personal sexual scripts are playing an important role in the changing sexual mores and behaviours of urban Chinese men under the age of 40, ranking first in terms of their influence on sexual knowledge and experience of multiple sexual partners, and ranking in the top three in terms of their influence on sexual behaviour and the trade in sex. These results suggest that the sexuality of these men is beginning to display a strong sense of autonomy, deviating from traditional social controls and, at the same time, avoiding many of the restraints imposed by interactions of the activities that make up the primary life cycle. This growing sense of sexual autonomy is perhaps the main reason why the sexual revolution in China has occurred first amongst this group. In future research, therefore, it might be useful to consider personal sexual scripts as an independent indicator of sexual change in China, at least for this particular cohort of respondents. Transformations in the primary life cycle 41 Second, the results provided in Table 2 suggest that future research on the nature of China’s sexual revolution might further consider the influence of ‘love’ because the influence of ‘love’ clearly varies across the categories of sexual change that were analysed in the nationwide survey. As an aspect of the primary life cycle, the category of ‘love’ appears to exert the least influence on the reception of sexual knowledge and sexual behaviours of Chinese men under the age of 40, obtaining the lowest ranking in both instances. Yet the influence of ‘love’ is ranked fourth with regard to the trade in sex, which is fractionally lower than the ranking of three for the influence of community cultures, but markedly higher than the lowest ranking of seven ascribed to the influence of social classes. Similarly, ‘love’ is ranked fifth with regard to male experiences of sex with multiple partners, which is fractionally lower than the ranking of four for the influence of social classes, but considerably higher than the lowest ranking of seven ascribed to the influence of community culture. Hence the influence of ‘love’ on the sexual behaviours and relationships of Chinese men could be clarified in future survey- based research. In short, constructing a more nuanced conception of how transformations in the activities that make up the primary life cycle are contributing to China’s sexual revolution might require a more detailed examination of the perceived relations between sex and love, and love and marriage, from the apparently different perspectives of members of the opposite sex.

Notes 1 The story of Chen Shimei has come to symbolize a dishonorable lack of constancy and loyalty in China. Chen was a traditional scholar who excelled himself by coming first in the imperial examination system. However, Chen proceeded to turn this honour into shame by accepting the daughter of the emperor as his bride, even though he was already married with two children. 2 For a discussion of the impact of locale on sexual cultures, see Flowers et al. 2000: 69–86.

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Gary Sigley

Introduction Descriptions of social change in China seem to be naturally associated with the metaphor of ‘revolution’ (Jing Wang 2001: 36–7). To a certain extent, the analogy is apt, especially when referring to the dramatic shifts in almost all fields of social life that have occurred in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949, and since the introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and Open Door Policy in December 1978, in particular. Maoist China was marked by the triumph and aftermath of ‘socialist revolution’ and was later subject to the chaos of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The post-1978 regime has continued to uphold a revolutionary tradition not only in terms of promoting the early communist legacy known as the ‘spirit of Yan’an’ (Apter 1995: 189–234), but also in the guise of promoting other revolutions: ‘reform as revolution’, ‘information revolution’, ‘consumer revolution’, and so on. Conventional wisdom now holds that China is in the throes of a new and very modern revolution, this time in the form of its own belated ‘sexual revolution’. For journalistic and academic commentators alike, this revolution represents an intense moment in the perceived ‘clash of civilizations’, a moment when Chinese citizens, especially the younger generation, embrace the ‘progressive’ sexual mores of the modern world. Hence, sociologists such as William Parish (cited in Braverman 2002: 1) suggest that China’s sexual culture will increasingly resemble that of Western societies. Conservative Party-state authorities in China, however, view the prospect of such a convergence in a far more negative light – that is, as undermining both socialist morality and, potentially, socio-political stability. This chapter highlights the relationship between the development of political and sexual culture in the PRC with reference to the anxiety that China’s sexual revolution generates for conservative Party-state authorities. The first section outlines the nature of moral discourse in the PRC, by examining the historical background to the political and social links that are made between sex and politics in China today. In the second section, I examine the terrain of the law and legitimate sex to give a sense of how the Chinese state attempts to impose a normative framework for sexual conduct at a macro level. The third section 44 Gary Sigley examines how the Party-state attempts to regulate sexual culture at a micro level with reference to the policing of the ‘cultural market’, especially the policing of pornography. In conclusion, I argue that China’s conservative Party-state authorities are partly right when they say that ‘sexual liberalization’ is a forerunner for ‘political liberalization’, but not for the reasons they suggest. Contrary to the official depiction of China’s changing sexual mores and behaviours as heralding social decay or the destruction of what is now referred to as ‘socialist spiritual civilization’, the ability of both state and society to respond to the realities of a changing sexual culture will stand as a measure of how freedom and autonomy are to be practiced in twenty-first century China.

Setting the scene: sexual revolution and the policing of virtue A popular view of China holds that social and economic development demands political liberalization and that visible signs of sexual liberalization can be read as a sign that political liberalization is taking place. Indeed, it is often claimed that sexual liberalization necessarily accompanies and advances a process of political liberalization. According to this particular reading, just as political liberalization implies greater political participation and autonomy on the part of citizens, so too sexual liberalization presupposes that during the process of social development, i.e. modernization, individuals will gain greater scope to conduct their sexual lives according to individual desires. In the process of looking at ‘traditional’ societies, such as China, these perceived markers of modernity and progress are said to be most evident in the changing sexual conduct of urban residents, especially in more cosmopolitan cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and even more so amongst younger population cohorts. In these locales, women now have greater scope to resist the familial demands of early marriage and motherhood and younger people begin their sexual lives much earlier than their parents who experienced the sexual austerity of the Maoist period.1 There has also been a dramatic increase in the public display of affection and sexual intimacy in present-day China. This seeming revolution in sexual mores and behaviours has been further accompanied by the emergence of a distinct semi-public gay culture in large urban centres, for instance, Beijing (Rofel 1999: 451–74). However, there are countertrends and anomalies in the reform period that make this model of progressive sexual–political advancement appear somewhat shaky. In some rural locations, such as the more developed Pearl River Delta, observers report that economic prosperity has actually resulted in the revival of traditional practices of concubinage, albeit in the modern guise of ‘mistress keeping’ (Yuen et al. 2004). Even in cosmopolitan cities such as Shanghai, it appears that traditional values of chastity and virginity are still highly regarded (Farrer 2002), as evidenced by the pragmatic way in which surgical procedures such as ‘hymen repairs’ are used to cover any traces of premarital ‘promiscuity’. Moreover, there is a great deal of official anxiety in present-day China about the sexual revolution, associated as it is with what are referred to as Western or Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 45 bourgeois notions of sexual liberation and sexual freedom (Sigley 2002: 118–53). Viewed in this context, there is more than a passing correlation between political and sexual liberalization in China; the two intersect in significant ways. Just as the Chinese state is determined to stem the tide of political liberalization, so too sexual liberalization is regarded as a barometer for the ability of socialist spiritual civilization to withstand the onslaughts of what is perceived by conservative Party-state authorities as the influx of bourgeois decadence and Western ideas. In other words, there remains a strong presence of moral righteousness in official Party-state pronouncements on matters of sexual behaviours and mores in China that needs some form of explanation, even though the current circumstances of corruption, conspicuous consumption and increasing class polarization make that ‘righteousness’ appear somewhat hypocritical. The nature of moral discourse in contemporary China and its relation to sex and politics owes much to historical considerations (Zarrow 1997). Since the start of the twentieth century, the political pendulum in China has swung between the two extremes of advocating the full preservation of traditional Chinese social and cultural life and the wholesale adoption of foreign, that is, Western capitalist, ways. After the establishment of ‘New China’ in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) embarked on a radical project of social and cultural transformation, which appeared to offer the modified alternative of rejecting both traditional culture and capitalism in one revolutionary thrust. However, with the shift towards the programme of ‘reform and openness’ and the ‘four modernizations’ in the late 1970s, the CCP opened the way for the revival of traditional and capitalist practices. In embarking on a radical programme of ‘reform and openness’ in the late 1970s, the Chinese Party-state acknowledged that exposure to foreign culture was necessary, particularly with regards to the importation of advanced methods in the sciences and economic management, but it was also concerned that some foreign cultural elements would have a detrimental impact on the socialist values and popular culture that had been advocated since 1949. In the sexual realm, it was worried that Western notions of sexual freedom and sexual liberation would corrupt Chinese youth. Here, it is important to note that, despite the radical and iconoclastic nature of policy and ideology during the Maoist period, there remained a strong element of social conservatism, especially in regards to institutions such as marriage and the family and towards sexual behaviour. It is this social and familial conservatism that has been challenged as Chinese society has ‘opened up’ during the last two decades. As far as some conservative elements within China’s political and social elite are concerned, political liberalization and sexual liberalization are equally problematic and must be assiduously contained and avoided. The sexual conservatism of Party-state authorities in present-day China can be traced to the internal dynamics of the Chinese revolution. During the period of civil war and Japanese invasion that characterized Chinese society and politics prior to the establishment of the PRC, the rival parties of the Guomindang and the CCP both stressed that it was only their particular political organization that could rightly claim to occupy the moral high ground and uphold mainstream morality, 46 Gary Sigley and, conversely, it was precisely the political opposition that was morally bankrupt and moribund. Claims to moral virtue in the realm of sexual relations were no exception. In fact, reference to the realm of sexual relations was one of the primary sources used to exemplify such claims in the first place. Just as the Guomindang accused the CCP of promoting immoral and ‘chaotic’ (luan) sexual conduct (such as the ‘collectivization’ of women), so too the CCP attacked the ruling Guomindang and social elite for wallowing in moral decadence. As far as the sexual morality of the CCP is concerned, a strong strain of sexual asceticism and conservatism developed during the initial period of revolutionary struggle, which is partly a reflection of the post-1927 militarization of the Party and its placation and adaptation of rural conservatism in the base areas. One strand of early Party policy and practice went through a rather radical stage in relation to views on sexual relations. This radicalism was expressed in the Party’s promotion of a romanticized view of sexual liberation as part and parcel of human liberation (a popular view amongst more intellectual and bohemian circles). And, it found concrete expression in the fact that in addition to carrying out land reform, which had always been a strong feature of peasant uprisings in dynastic China, the Party promoted marriage reform on the basis that the feudal system prohibited many within the ranks of the exploited classes (i.e. men) from finding marital partners (i.e. women) (Hu 1974: 477–90; Stacey 1983: 187–8). However, the radical edge of the Party’s early views of sexual relations was tempered by an equally strong strain of sexual asceticism and conservatism. As part of the process of garnering popular support, the early CCP appealed to the latent hostility amongst the masses towards wealthy landlords and capitalists who lived in sumptuous surroundings on the sweat and toil of ordinary folk. This appeal included allusions to sexual decadence and inequality in which the rich kept concubines and mistresses whilst poor men struggled to find a solitary mate. CCP propaganda also often depicted rich landlords as lechers with an evil and lascivious eye on buxom peasant beauties. Huang Shiren, the evil landlord and Guomindang collaborator portrayed in the revolutionary ballet The White Haired Girl, is depicted in this manner. CCP propaganda further held that it was precisely this kind of decadence and selfish sexual gratification that made China the ‘sick man of Asia’. In any case, the early CCP maintained that the new society to be ushered in by socialism would be superior in all respects to that of ‘Old China’. Insofar as ‘New China’ would be based on sound material conditions of social equality, it was also bound to be morally superior to the characteristic decadence and servitude of semi-feudal and semi-colonial China. The comprehensive and assertive way in which the CCP allegedly eradicated prostitution and transformed former prostitutes into exemplary factory workers during the first few years of the People’s Republic was and continues to be cited as the example par excellence of socialism’s moral integrity in the area of establishing new and more equitable socio-sexual relations (Xin and Xiao (eds) 2000). Another frequently cited example is the 1950 Marriage Law. This was the first item of legislation to be promulgated in the PRC and outlawed arranged marriages and polygamy. Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 47 In addition to the dynamics and imperatives of revolution, the sexual conservatism of Party-state authorities in present-day China can also be traced to the historical and continued division between elite and popular cultures in the PRC. Elite culture in contemporary China remains closely tied to the transformative agenda of the Chinese ‘Enlightenment’, such as that embodied in the 1919 May Fourth Tradition, which advocated radical and iconoclastic change and maintains a linear and progressive view of culture. In this scheme of things, cultural products should work towards continuously improving the moral substance of the target subject. By contrast, popular culture, especially of the commercial kind, is regarded as crude, vulgar and bawdy, particularly when it contains sexual overtones. The continued presence of elitist attitudes towards culture in China today is evidenced in official pronouncements on the relationship between culture and morality. These pronouncements attempt to establish a link between both social stability and progress and moral virtue. The moral agenda that ensues from this linkage is outlined in the Party-state’s doctrine on socialist spiritual civilization, which is itself a direct descendent of the kind of lofty moralism inherent in Chinese modernity. Within this schema, sexual conduct and the relations between the sexes are targeted as important elements of regulation and intervention. The family is presented as a particularly important target of governmental regulation insofar as it is viewed as the ‘cell of society’. Hence official pronouncements on the relationship between culture and morality suggest that sexual conduct should ideally be restricted to the monogamous heterosexual unit, since any spillage beyond these confines threatens to disturb the social fabric. This injunction to uphold the monogamous heterosexual unit and control other forms of sexual conduct in order to maintain social stability is what I refer to as the ‘policing of virtue’. However, there are two good reasons why the policing of virtue in contemporary China should not be construed simply as a reflection of the continued division between elite and popular culture, or merely an ideological tussle between conservative and progressive elements of Chinese society. First, the policing of virtue can be a lucrative business at the local level (Pan Suiming et al. 2004: 343). Police officers and local government cadres can gain considerable pecuniary advantage, in the form of bribes and fines, from maintaining the current policy of banning sex work and pornography in China, a policy known as ‘saohuang’ (literally ‘sweeping away the yellow industries’).2 Second, the Chinese Party-state’s emphasis on social stability, and the moral righteousness associated with its claims to legitimacy, reflect the way in which China’s ruling elite seeks to stem the tide of political rights. In the current context of rapid social and economic change, the Party-state is obsessed, and not without good cause, with maintaining order and stability. Order and stability are viewed as key elements in the task of reigning in the runaway engine of modernization. Even ‘tradition’, once targeted by political campaigns of the Maoist period as corrupt, moribund and anachronistic, is seen as having a positive effect on putting the brakes on undesirable social change (Bakken 2000: 22). Indeed, Wang Hui (2002: 173) goes as far as to regard neoconservatism as ‘the official ideology of modernization within the Party-state’. 48 Gary Sigley Put another way, although the moral pronouncements of the Party-state regarding the decadent and socially undesirable nature of the yellow industries may appear somewhat vacuous and hypocritical, they are important insofar as they constitute a call for cadres to be vigilant in not letting the discourse of rights spread too far and fast. Certainly, there is a concern that if the Party-state gives too much ground in the realm of sexual freedom, by abandoning or significantly modifying its longstanding ideological opposition to the yellow industries, then other domains, such as the political realm, will be less able to resist calls for reform. More precisely, both the morality of ‘socialism’ and of ‘Chinese tradition’, which make up the foundations of socialist spiritual civilization, are seen as providing the normative framework for ensuring ‘healthy’ social, including sexual, conduct. As Børge Bakken (2000: 22) points out, therefore, it is misleading to view the process of ‘reform and openness’ as signifying the retreat of the state from the realm of social and economic life. On the contrary, the Chinese Party-state, in conjunction with a revitalized social elite, has embarked on an ambitious programme of social engineering (shehui gongcheng) since 1978. Unlike many Western societies, where the notion of social engineering has become, at least rhetorically, anathema to the practice of good governance, the expression shehui gongcheng retains a positive connotation in Chinese and is often explicitly cited as such in government and scholarly texts. The positive stress on notions of social engineering in present-day China owes much to the fact that the Chinese Marxist version of the Enlightenment project maintained and developed a strong connection between the ability of the social sciences, particularly under the auspices of Marxism, to know social phenomenon, including social morality, in a scientific fashion and, consequently, to shape social development (Wang Hui 2001: 135–56). Although the Maoist parameters for direct social intervention have been progres- sively abandoned or modified in post-1978 China, members of the CCP and other social elites have retained the tendency to think about guiding social change and development in explicitly constructivist terms. At the same time, the post-1978 social and economic reforms, and the processes they have unleashed, have seriously hindered the Party-state’s ability to ‘social engineer’. With the embracement of what is termed the ‘socialist market economy’ in China, the Party-state has begun to encourage and foster the development of a civil society. Reformists recognise that the old-style paternalism of the Chinese Party-state must give way to more flexible forms of governance that actually draw upon enterprise and individual autonomy rather than prohibit and obstruct it. This shift in the nature of governmental reasoning has been accompanied by the depoliticization of daily life. Hence, as much as the mind of the Party-state might declare its intentions to shape sexual conduct, the body can no longer be roused into action. As formidable as it still is at certain moments and in certain contexts, the Chinese Party-state’s ability to directly intervene into the private life of citizens has significantly diminished. The relationship between sex and politics in contemporary China is thus highly complex. In China, this relationship is generally constructed as a problem or as Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 49 a question of morality and, subsequently, in terms of the responsibility that both China’s Party-state authorities and social elites should or should not have in guiding and regulating sexual conduct. However, there is a growing recognition that the relationship between sex and politics should be understood less in terms of morality and the overt policing of public virtue and more as a ‘problem’ that is specifically governmental in nature. For example, many commentators in China now contend that Party-state authorities need to acknowledge that existing approaches to the governance of the yellow industries are not working, rather they are themselves generating corruption, social injustice and infringing on basic freedoms. Hence the next section highlights the increasing gap between the Chinese Party-state’s vision of how sexual relations should be regulated and how those relations are actually unfolding in the current context of rapid social change.

Putting sex in its place: the law, official discourse and legitimate sex The Party-state and official discourses in China recognize only one legitimate outlet for sexual relations — those that occur within the confines of the heterosexual marital unit. Sexual relations that occur within any other context are subject to either criminal or administrative sanctions, or, in cases where such sanctions do not apply, to moral condemnation. For example, sex work, although widespread throughout the PRC, is illegal. Technically speaking, only third parties involved in running establishments that provide sexual services or other intermediary services between clients and sex workers are subject to criminal prosecution according to the Chinese Criminal Law. However, the activities of sex workers continue to be targeted under the auspices of the Public Security Regulations (zhian guanli chufa tiaoli) (Li 2003: 64–5). Extramarital and premarital sex, although increasingly common, are strongly discouraged. Same sex relations, whilst not illegal, have in the past been subject to administrative sanctions and widespread social discrimination and harassment (see the chapter by Li Yinhe in this volume). Although it is increasingly common practice to say that consensual sexual relations between adults are a private matter in which the law should not intervene, the law nonetheless plays a crucial role in sanctifying those arrangements which are regarded as socially acceptable and subsequently providing all the concerned parties with appropriate legal protection. In China, the law and official discourse work together to frame the heterosexual marital unit as the ‘normal’ place for the practice of sexual relations. Official discourse, and it would perhaps be fair to say much of mainstream opinion in China, holds that the family is the ‘cell of society’. The biological analogy of the family as the ‘cell’ of Chinese society is important insofar as it reflects the predominant understanding that society is akin to a living organism. Viewed from this perspective, Chinese society can only maintain a healthy state of existence if all its constituent elements function properly. Hence familial stability lies at the heart of the previously mentioned concern of China’s political and social elites with the issue of social stability. 50 Gary Sigley As the ‘cell of society’, the family constitutes the most basic and fundamental building block. It is therefore at the familial level that China’s political and social elites attempt to sanctify and encourage sexual conduct that conforms to a predetermined normative agenda (Sigley 2002: 118–53). China’s political and social elites have attempted to sanctify and encourage a normative view of sexual behaviours and relationships through the application of the law and administrative regulations to the field of sexual conduct. There are two major ways, one direct and the other indirect, in which the law can intervene in this regard. First, the law can explicitly prohibit specific forms of sexual practice. As Li Yinhe (2003: 40–1) explains, sexual practices that are subject to legal sanctions in China can be divided into those practices that have ‘victims’ and those which are ‘victimless’ (at least as far as the immediate parties are concerned). Following the work of Michel Foucault (1978), Li argues that the law should have nothing to do with sexual practice ideally. That is to say, the law should neither involve itself with issues pertaining to consensual adult sex, nor should it be deployed to pass a moral judgement in favour of one form of sexual practice or relationship over others. However, ‘victimless’ sexual relations in China, such as those relating to sex work, pornography, and group sex (juzhong yinluan), are subjected to various criminal and/or administrative sanctions (Li 2003: 84–5). Citing numerous cases in which Chinese citizens have been severely punished, including the passing of the death penalty, for sexual practices that are voluntary, consensual and victimless, Li concludes that the Party-state’s legal response to the governance of consensual, adult sexual relations should be discarded because it not only infringes upon individual sexual rights, but also is ultimately unen- forceable, since strict enforcement would entail rendering a large proportion of the population subject to criminal prosecution (ibid.). Second, the law can work through more indirect methods to sanctify certain forms of social relationships and, by extension, to legitimize the forms of sexual relations that take place therein. In the context of sanctifying legitimate sexual relations, the PRC’s Marriage Law of 1950 is a foundation document. It was one of the first items of legislation to come into being in the People’s Republic of China, and was specifically aimed at dealing with the feudal marriage system, that is, with ending arranged marriages and concubinage. The Marriage Law was also the first major item of legislation to be revised at the beginning of the reform period, in 1980, to reflect the new agenda of social and economic reform, and also the demands of population planning that were then gathering steam. In 2001, the Marriage Law was further revised, amidst considerable public debate, in order to adjust to the various social issues that have emerged during the reform period, such as domestic violence, extramarital affairs and marital breakdown. The proposed revisions to the PRC’s Marriage Law of 2001 generated heated public debate over the role of the law in regulating the private affairs of citizens, the relationship between law and morality, and the question of whether or not society’s interest might be served by state intervention (Alford and Shen 2004). For instance, both officials in the All-China Women’s Federation and the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and also many social commentators, viewed the growing rates of Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 51 domestic violence, extramarital affairs and divorce that had accompanied the reform process as an indication that the institution of the family, the traditional ‘cell of society’, was under enormous pressure. Women and children were seen as particularly vulnerable; hence it was argued that something had to be done in order to ensure that they were adequately protected. Most notably, there were calls to reinstate ‘adultery laws’ to punish those parties who have extra-marital relations and provide compensation for injured parties. Conversely, other commentators contended that any step towards greater state intervention into the realm of domestic affairs constituted a step backwards. Whilst acknowledging the serious nature of familial problems in contemporary China, they argued that sanctioning in law the power of the state to punish consensual adult sexual relations was an infringement of basic rights. Still others, such as Li Yinhe, insisted that the opportunity should be taken in the making of revisions to widen the scope of marital unions to include members of the same sex. Despite the controversial nature of this debate, when the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress finally passed the revisions to the PRC’s Marriage Law in April 2001, these revisions confirmed that Chinese law would only recognize a union between a man and a woman as legally valid (hence same- sex unions are not recognized by default). The revisions also made clear that only couples who registered their marriages with the appropriate authorities would be subject to the rights and duties outlined in the Marriage Law. For example, in addition to outlawing bigamy, the revised Marriage Law prohibits persons already married from cohabiting with others (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyin fa 2001). To be fair, the new Marriage Law does not prohibit cohabitation per se. A second set of interpretations, which were compiled by the Supreme Court and issued in December 2003, state that the courts will not deal with cases of cohabitation in which both parties are not married. While affirming the importance of the heterosexual marital unit, the interpretations go on to suggest that the courts can intervene in those cases of cohabitation where one partner is currently married to someone else, or where children and property are involved. It thus appears that cohabitation does gain de facto legal recognition, but only insofar as property and children are concerned (‘Zuigao renmin fayuan guanyu shiyong zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyinfa ruogan wenti de jieshi (yi)’ 2001). The PRC’s new Marriage Law therefore continues to sanctify a particular view of appropriate socio-sexual relations by bringing into play a moral judgement that effectively places legally registered marriages in a position of superiority to those relationships that are not under the jurisdiction of the Marriage Law. For instance, in commenting on one particular case, Judge Wei Dong of the Guandu District Court in Kunming City, Yunnan Province, is quoted as saying: ‘Illegal cohabitation has never received legal and social recognition in China. As an abnormal social phenomenon, illegal cohabitation brings into play many unsettling factors in relation to social order and the stability of the normal matrimonial family’ (‘Wuxiao hunyin caichan yueding bushou baohu’ 2003). In a similar vein, Judge Yao Qiongfang admonishes young couples, especially women, to legally register their marriages so as to ensure they are fully covered by the Marriage Law. 52 Gary Sigley De facto relationships, she states, are frivolous relationships that do not take seriously the sanctity of marriage and the associated duties and obligations (ibid.). In sum, reference to the various ways in which the Chinese Party-state has sought to sanctify the heterosexual marital unit in law is not meant to imply that sexual relations in present-day China have yet to be separated from the act of procreation. Contrary to the arguments of Western China scholars such as Frank Dikötter (1995), who maintain that the lack of official attention to issues of sexual rights in contemporary China flows from the continued equation of sex with reproduction, there is a wealth of literature and counselling services that seek to make certain that sexual relations between husband and wife are pleasurable and mutually gratifying. Moreover, it is now claimed that satisfactory sexual relations are an important element in maintaining conjugal harmony and familial stability (see Sigley 2002: 118–53). Nonetheless, there is clearly an increasing gap between the Chinese Party-state’s vision of how sexual relations should be regulated and how those relations are actually unfolding in current social practice. Whilst there are indubitably many people in China who support the official construction of the heterosexual marital family as the basis of a healthy social order, and who believe that the law should be used to police sexual relations, there are also many others who believe that it is not the responsibility of the state to intrude into the private sexual affairs of citizens. The governance of sexual relations is thus one area in which the Chinese government’s desire to maintain Party-state authority, and to impose a specific moral order on society, brushes up against an emerging consciousness of citizen rights and civil society. These tensions are particularly pronounced in relation to the Chinese Party-state’s approach to the policing of commercial sexual services and pornography, or the yellow industries, as the next section shows.

Policing virtue: stemming the tide of pornography China’s central authorities not only deem it necessary to attempt to regulate social morality as it relates to sexual conduct by codifying certain moral prescriptions in law, but also regard the policing of sexually explicit and erotic material as an important measure in the fight against ‘social decadence’, much of which continues to be blamed on corrupt foreign influences (Xin and Xiao (eds) 2000). However, on this particular front, the Chinese Party-state appears to be fighting a losing battle. Pornography of any sort, soft or hardcore, is illegal in China and is an ongoing target of anti-yellow campaigns. Yet a recent survey of sexual behaviour in urban China found that 39.8 per cent of males had viewed pornographic material in the previous year, with a rate of 71.5 per cent for those aged between 20 to 25 years (Pan Suiming et al. 2004: 335–6). Overall it was estimated that two thirds of the male population had viewed pornographic material in the previous year. In fact, the percentage of adults who have viewed pornographic material in the under 35 age group in China is estimated to be equivalent, and in some instances higher, than the same group in the United States (ibid.: 341). The authors of the survey therefore conclude that 20 years of intensive moralizing and police-led Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 53 campaigns to ‘sweep away’ pornography have amounted to virtually nothing: the more one ‘sweeps’ the ‘yellower’ it becomes (yue sao yue huang). As the results of this particular survey suggest, although pornographic material of any sort is illegal in present-day China, it is readily accessible. In urban centres, street peddlers openly solicit pornographic DVDs to passers-by; and similar material is available for purchase in the many audio-visual stores that dot the urban landscape. News stands and bookstores sell ‘soft’ pornographic magazines thinly disguised as artistic photographic collections. A search of menu bar histories at the ubiquitous internet bar reveals that pornographic sites are frequently visited. Hence many media reports lament that the Chinese internet, and, more recently, the medium of text messaging, are being increasingly swamped with pornographic material by those wishing to cash in on ‘base animal instincts’ (‘Qingse shan “jin” guang fushi hulianwang’ 2003; ‘Seqing xinxi zai wangshang dasi liancai’ 2003; ‘Shouji duanxin “huanghuo” fanlan’ 2002). In addition, Chinese cities are home to numerous family planning or adult stores, which package their products with explicit images, even though they do not sell pornographic material. These products are also available for purchase through online adult product sites (see the chapter by Jo McMillan in this volume). In other words, pornography may be illegal and an ongoing target of policing campaigns, but it is an established feature of commercial culture in contemporary China. Why do China’s central authorities continue to implement anti-yellow campaigns, given the apparent ineffectiveness of such measures in the reform period? An apparent contradiction here is that while the political centre continues to take a high moral stance with regard to the policing of commercial sexual services and pornography, there is a distinct lack of will power to carry out the policy in full at the local level, other than going through the motions of undertaking anti-yellow campaigns in order to satisfy superiors and meet the conditions of the cadre responsibility system. Briefly, cadres in China, particularly those in relatively senior positions at county level and above, are obligated to sign a responsibility contract (Edin 2003: 1–15). The details of these contracts vary. However, in addition to meeting economic targets, many contracts include the obligation to fulfil ‘socialist spiritual civilization’ objectives, which means implementing anti-yellow campaigns. Failure to meet such targets results in financial penalties and reduces the relevant individual’s likelihood of promotion (ibid.). Concomitantly, as Pan Suiming et al. (2004: 343) and other commentators note, the motivation to ‘sweep away the yellow’ at a local level often has more to do with the creation of income through issuing fines and practicing extortion rather than a genuine concern with the policing of virtue. In the words of one anonymous web commentator: ‘Each brick in every newly erected Public Security Bureau building is made up of the receipts from fines and other dirty doings’ (‘Lun maiyin buneng hefahua de zhenzheng yuanyi’ 2004). The same commentator further claims that it is not just the Public Security Bureau that benefits from the policing of virtue; there are a host of other government departments that exact some kind of payment from the managers of karaoke and massage establishments and from the people who work within such establishments, i.e. establishments that are 54 Gary Sigley associated with the provision of commercial sexual services. The Ministry of Industry and Commerce exacts an ‘industrial and commercial management fee’; the Ministry of Health requires payment for a ‘health certificate’; the Ministry of Labour not only demands a ‘certificate of employment’, but also demands that masseuses hold recognized qualifications; and, finally, the Ministry of Culture requires that entertainment establishments have official authority to operate. As the commentator concludes, if sex work were legalized in China there undoubtedly would be a new set of fees and an equivalent amount of paper work, but the opportunity to engage in frequent ‘crackdowns’, and hence frequent fining, along with extortion, would be significantly reduced (ibid.). Although many commentators in China are becoming increasingly cynical regarding the nature and utility of continuing to implement campaigns against commercial sexual services and pornography, it is hardly surprising that China’s yellow industries have become subject to bureaucratic regulation. As mentioned previously, the prominence of central planning may have receded into the background of governmental rhetoric, but the Chinese Party-state still regards the ‘normalization’ and ‘rectification’ of the socialist market economy as a key priority. Whilst acknowledging the utility and desirability of the market, China’s central authorities continue to hold that unchecked market forces, and the environment that they foster, may be detrimental to overall social stability. The cultural domain is a particular case in point: it is viewed as an important target for governmental intervention so as to ensure a ‘healthy’ moral environment, and is one of the key fronts in recent efforts to maintain order and stability. As also mentioned previously, the links that China’s central authorities posit between the cultural domain, social morality and social stability, owe much to the political dynamics of the Maoist era in which culture was regarded as a key area of revolutionary activity. During the Maoist period, the notion of the market was anathema to socialist culture. Cultural products were meant to embody a pedagogic function rather than a leisure function. There was no notion that individuals could choose what to consume according to their own desires and requirements. The more recent arrival of the market in China has thus heralded the transformation of socialist subjects into capitalist consumers. The corresponding rapid development of the market for cultural products has simultaneously provided the consumer with a new degree of choice, and given cultural enterprises boundless opportunities to turn a profit. ‘Choice’, however, is a concept that China’s central authorities are having a difficult time coming to terms with because they view the cultural market as possessing its own peculiarities, ones that distinguish it from other markets and which require special consideration. Specifically, the cultural market is viewed as providing products that contain ‘spiritual sustenance’ and therefore have a direct bearing on concepts of morality and idealism. Consequently, cultural enterprises are enjoined not only to pay close attention to the task of uniting economic and social benefits, but also to put the social benefit in a superior position when deciding what kind of cultural content to produce (Liu and Liu 2002: 7–8). Unfortunately, finding the right balance between social and economic benefit is Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 55 not always easy in the current context of economic reform. Instead, it is acknowledged, albeit reluctantly, that ‘some products of a high quality, and therefore with positive social benefit, have low rates of distribution and economic benefit, whereas products of low social benefit, and which even include pornographic and vulgar content, have a wide distribution and a very large economic benefit’ (ibid.). In drawing a distinction between products that have a positive social benefit and those that have low social benefit, the latter comment highlights the continued division between elite and popular culture in China, and hints at the ways in which notions of elite culture are mobilized to dominate and regulate what is perceived as ‘vulgar culture’. Put simply, the rapid pace of commercialization in China is viewed as naturally favouring the development of vulgar culture, of which pornography is seen as the driving force. Hence conservative intellectuals lament that many ‘cultured people’ (wenhuaren) have abandoned their historical mission to raise the cultural level of the nation and have instead been seduced by material gain into producing base cultural products (Xin Qibing 1991: 235–37; see also Barmé 1999; Tao 1999). This elitist and transformative attitude towards managing the relationship between culture and the market nonetheless still maintains its grip on official ideology. As the opening paragraph of the ‘Directive from the Office of the State Council on Further Progress in Rectifying and Normalising Order in the Cultural Market’ states:

The cultural market is an important component of the socialist market economy. In advancing the construction of socialist material civilization the Central Committee and State Council are, at the same time, incessantly striving to promote socialist spiritual civilization. Efforts are being made to promote the constant increase in the ideological and moral quality, as well as the scientific and cultural level, of the entire nation. However, due to various factors, the order of the cultural market is still in a state of chaos. This is particularly evident in internet access establishments, electronic game arcades, dance halls, audiovisual product stores, in publication and software markets, the printing industry and cultural artefact markets. In these locations, illegal conduct is a common occurrence; a great deal of content that is vulgar, ignorant and superstitious, violent, pornographic, that involves gambling, and which is even reactionary, can be found. This content harms the social environment, effects the unity of China’s nationalities and social stability, and especially causes serious harm to the mental and physical well-being of children. The people have expressed strong indignation towards this state of affairs and it is therefore necessary to implement wide-reaching rectification and standardization (Guowuyuan bangongting 2001).

This statement offers a good example of the kind of moral rhetoric that is issued by China’s central authorities, namely, a rhetoric that clings to notions of progressive moral improvement through exposure to ‘healthy’ cultural products. It also underscores the practical problems associated with efforts to put this 56 Gary Sigley regulatory strategy into practice. As these difficulties suggest, the policing of pornography in present-day China is a governmental rather than strictly moral problem: it is a problem of attempting to adapt the unifying logic of Maoist socialism to the conditions of a market society. To elaborate, regulative and supervisory bodies, such as the Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau, are charged with the enormous task of ensuring that the perceived chaos of the cultural market is transformed into a state of order and stability. Accordingly, the scope of the Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau in policing the cultural market is extensive. The Bureau is responsible for supervising the cultural market, the officially sanctioned points of sale, the transportation routes and also the itinerant salespersons who display their wares by the side of the road. As if this were not enough, the Bureau is also burdened with regulating the sale of such material through the internet, as well as supervising the numerous internet cafes themselves (along with standard game arcades). Last, but not least, in conjunction with the Public Security Bureau and the News Publication Bureau, the supervision and regulation of the printing and publication industry also falls within its purview. The extensive responsibilities of the Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau can be illustrated with reference to the 2002 ‘anti-pornography/prostitution’ and ‘anti-counterfeit/piracy’ campaign. In addition to targeting pornographic material, this campaign also targeted illegal political and terrorist publications, including those relating to the outlawed Falungong organization, as part of a more general campaign against the infringement of copyright (Guojia gongshang xingzheng guanli zongju 2002). In 2002, the Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau asserted that, in the area of pornographic material alone, it confiscated 52,000 pornographic and erotic magazines and 1.1 million pornographic audio-visual items (Wang Xudong 2002: 66). Yet even official accounts note that this figure barely puts a dent in the flourishing yellow industries. Given that it proved impossible to eradicate the hand-copied dissemination of ‘pornographic’ texts like The Heart of a Young Woman under the police-state conditions of the pre-reform period,3 many commentators now question the feasibility of government efforts to contain pornography in the more open climate of economic reform and the age of mass media reproduction. Certainly, many commentators suggest that local officials simply go through the motions when it comes to anti-yellow campaigns, they do not seek to carry out the policy rigorously. As one report notes, they ‘make thunderous noises, but bring little rain’ (Zhai et al. 1994: 30). In the face of such inertia, some commentators maintain that local officials have concluded that the yellow industries play a positive role in economic development and that anti-yellow campaigns impede the efficient functioning of market processes (Wu 1995: 268–70). Other reports suggest that while the concern of China’s central authorities to create a safe and healthy environment for the consumption of cultural products is genuine, the ‘anti-yellow’ campaign mentality of total eradication is obstructive because it is not only significantly divorced from reality, but also infringes upon the rights of adults to practice their constitutional rights to freedom of expression. For example, although the manufacture, distribution and sale of pornography is Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 57 illegal in China, a recent case indicates that citizens have the right, albeit somewhat ambiguously, to consume pornographic material in private spaces. In August 2002, police officers in Shaanxi Province took into custody a certain Mr Zhang who was accused of viewing pornographic video material with his wife in the privacy of his own home. Mr Zhang was later released when it was confirmed that there was insufficient legal grounds for his detention in the first place (‘Cong zai jia kan huangdie shijian tan “wushanghai yuanze”’ 2002). Article 32 of the Public Security Regulations prohibits the manufacture, reproduction, sale, rental and dissemination of pornographic books, images, audio-visual material and any other pornographic items, and China’s Criminal Law prohibits the sale of book publishing numbers used for the publication of pornographic content. However, the decision with regard to Mr Zhang confirmed that there are no relevant regulations prohibiting the private viewing of pornographic material in China. The conclusion of this particular case thus highlights the growing tensions between the Chinese Party-state’s desire to regulate sexual conduct and the emerging discourse of rights. In consequence, as some Chinese commentators have begun to argue, it might be wiser for China’s central authorities to abandon the campaign ‘eradication’ mentality in favour of examining the extent to which the various yellow industries should and can be regulated. This is not to argue that China’s yellow industries should be unrestricted. Concerns regarding the exposure of minors to pornographic materials are serious in China, as in many other countries, and such concerns constituted one of the major rationales behind the decision of China’s central authorities to launch a massive nationwide campaign against pornography on the Chinese internet in 2004 (see China Internet Information Center 2004). It is simply to note that a different approach to the policing of virtue might be more appropriate and effective than the ‘strike hard campaign’. Certainly, some commentators argue that China should introduce a system of adult ratings and that pornographic material should be appropriately packaged so as to satisfy the general social propriety (‘“Qingse” tushu fenji youdian nan’ 2003). Likewise, broadcasting authorities recently have issued guidelines for the airing of television content during prime time that takes into consideration the presence of children. In other words, the potential to shift the way pornography is regulated in China already exists. The major obstacle to implementing such change is a moral hurdle made up of an anachronistic view of culture and a system of regulation that has vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Conclusion China’s sexual culture is undergoing a period of significant change and conservative elements within the Party-state apparatus regard the management of that change as imperative to maintaining social stability, and, by extension, Party-state authority. The Chinese Party-state has sought to define the parameters of legitimate sexual relations through the application of legislative means. It has also used the bureaucratic and institutional resources at its disposal in efforts to police 58 Gary Sigley sexually explicit material in the cultural market. However, this same legislative push has functioned to promote a rights consciousness, which, in turn, has led to the exposure of various grey areas in relation to the policing of sexual behaviour amongst consenting adults. The nexus between sex and politics in present-day China is thus composed of multiple contradictions. On the one hand, the Chinese Party-state has pushed for the full development of a market society, whilst simultaneously lamenting the evils of the market in promoting ‘hedonism’, ‘moral corruption’, ‘sexual licentiousness’, and so on. Notions of sexual liberation and sexual freedom are presented as challenging the morals and values that are the perceived bedrock of all civilized societies. On the other hand, the very process of reform has generated new spaces for the public discussion of issues of sex and sexuality. Consequently, Chinese scholars such as Li Yinhe and Pan Suiming have begun to bring a different set of concerns to the attention of state and society alike. As they variously point out, the official condemnation of notions of sexual liberation and sexual freedom fails to acknowledge the multiple ways in which sex, morality and power have come to be intertwined in most societies over the last two centuries: ‘sexual morality’ is not an ahistorical presence embodied in the civilizing process; to be civilized is not necessarily to be puritan. While efforts to overturn the dominant ideological position of moral puritanism in China have been frustrated to date, there are signs that the situation may change in the near future. The problem of HIV/AIDS is challenging the official policy of banning the selling and buying of sex in the PRC, not least by suggesting that regulating, rather than prohibiting, sex work is necessary for the implementation of safe-sex programmes (see the chapter by Zhang Heqing in this volume). The growing presence and increasing ease of accessibility of the internet is also challenging previous conceptions of how best to create a safe environment for minors. These challenges indicate that regulating the yellow industries is not at heart a moral problem: it is a question of government. Governing these industries in an appropriate manner not only entails devising more effective means of regulation and administration, but also respecting the rights of consenting adults to engage in the sexual conduct of their choice. The issue of whether the act of respecting the rights of consenting adults to engage in the sexual conduct of their choice would lead to greater demands for political rights, or, indeed, is itself a manifestation thereof, is a problem the Party-state would rather forestall, but ultimately must contend with.

Notes 1 While it is conventional practice to suggest that sexual relations were seriously proscribed during the Maoist period, there were of course exceptions to these circumstances, particularly amongst some of the youth sent to the countryside as part of Maoist rusti- fication campaigns. The intense sexual experience of one such individual is captured in Wang Xiaobo’s (2000) biographical account of ‘sent-down’ life during the Cultural Revolution. Of course, Wang Xiaobo’s account could only come to light with the passing of the Maoist era. For an English-language account that questions the conventional suggestion that ‘sex’ was taboo during the Maoist period, see Honig (2003: 143–75). Sex, politics and the policing of virtue 59 2 Huangse is the Chinese term for ‘yellow’. Within the phrase ‘saohuang’, the term ‘huang’, is usually translated into English as ‘pornographic’. However, huang has a much broader connotation insofar as it is used by certain quarters of Chinese society to condemn both pornographic material and commercial sex as being morally decadent and socially undesirable. In this chapter, therefore, Chinese campaigns to eradicate pornography and sex work will be referred to as ‘anti-yellow campaigns’, and pornographic materials and commercial sex will be rendered collectively as the ‘yellow industries’. 3 During the ‘puritanical’ Cultural Revolution era, counter-hegemonic views on sexual experience and relations were disseminated via the underground ‘copied by hand’ literature such as the recently republished Heart of a Young Woman (Bai (ed.) 2003). Heart of a Young Woman apparently continued to be circulated even into the 1980s and is mentioned on a number of occasions in official morality tales in which unwary readers become sexually overexcited and fall into a ‘pornographic quagmire’. According to Ren Ke (1989: 252–5) and Wu Haimin (1995: 83–4), the appearance of Heart of a Young Woman in the early 1970s, and its gradual spread throughout the country, marked the beginning of China’s post-1949 ‘anti-pornography’ campaigns.

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Margaret Y. K. Woo

Introduction With market reforms and greater internal migration of its population, China is experiencing higher divorce rates and a greater reported incidence of premarital and extramarital affairs than ever before. Released from traditional constraints and freed by the market mantra of bargain and choice, Chinese men and women are consumers at home and work, in their private relationships as well as their public roles. For many commentators, these changes provide an indication that China is undergoing a ‘sexual revolution’. How has the Chinese legal system dealt with the changing sexual conduct of Chinese citizens? As a vehicle for dispute resolution and social coercion, law has regulated sexual conduct in all societies through a mix of criminalization (bigamy, prostitution and sodomy) and legalization of certain relationships and conducts (marriage, procreation) as well as dissolution of these relations (divorce). Marriage policy is a tool to sculpt a nation’s citizenry and moral standards, and, consequently, marriage laws and their enforcement provide a critical lens through which one can examine citizenship rights in any nation-state (Cott 2000). Examining the Chinese state’s changing policies toward marriage and the dissolution of marriage thus provides insights into issues of status and inequality, intimacy and violence, and philosophies about proper governance in China today. Marriage, family and inheritance laws impact upon Chinese women arguably more than any other laws, due to the historical and continued emphasis that is placed in China upon the family as the perceived ‘cell’ of society and the foundation of social stability. Chinese women traditionally were absent from the public sphere. Hence, recent efforts to establish gender equality often turn on the suggestion that the law’s attention and protection should be directed towards women. At the same time, the historical regulation of women to the family and private sphere meant that women necessarily became subject to legal regulation by virtue of laws governing the family. As a result, changes in marriage and divorce laws inevitably increase or decrease the status of Chinese women and each change must be assessed carefully. This chapter examines the status of Chinese women in light of recent market reforms, changes in marriage norms, and women’s growing assertion of authority Contesting citizenship 63 over their sexuality and marriages in the courts. It is based on data collected from divorce litigants who filed for divorce in the late 1990s. The stories they told and the experiences they related present a picture of Chinese women caught between the demands of collective and individual rights and of a Chinese state that is fluc- tuating between the not always conterminous demands of economic development and social stability.

Economic reform and Chinese women Since the start of China’s economic reforms and its re-entry to the global economy in the 1980s, Chinese women’s social status has increased in some ways, but decreased in others. Although the market economy has offered women greater mobility and freedom, such mobility has also resulted in greater threats for women at home and in the workplace (Wang 2000: 126–52). These problems may be traced to a ‘commodification of the feminine’ and take form in two contrasting trends (Woo 2000: 308–29). The first of these trends, the outward migration of Chinese women from local to regional to national, is a recent phenomenon. Over the past decade or so, China has literally become a nation in migration; Chinese sources report that close to 40 million women have given up farming for industrial sector labour (East Asia Environmental and Social Development Unit, World Bank 2002; Zhang Ye 2001). Among these millions are the women, collectively known as dagongmei (labouring sisters), who have migrated to cities for work within the exploding numbers of foreign-invested, township and privately-owned enterprises (Ngai 1999: 1–20). In some factories in the special economic zones, female workers constitute 90 per cent of the labour force (Jordan 1996: 216). This outward labour migration renders women especially vulnerable to male exploitation, particularly economic and sexual abuse, by placing young, uneducated rural women under the authority of urban male supervisors (ibid.). Moreover, since these migrating women often take non-contractual, less desirable, temporary jobs without urban residence registration, they work without the social benefits normally guaranteed to state workers (Williams and Woo 1995: 510–11). While it may be argued that such jobs are better than no jobs at all, these jobs create societal stratification, with female workers consistently on the bottom rung. The combination of abusive bosses and limited state benefits often subjects women to poor working conditions, discrimination, sexual abuse, and harassment (‘Employment: threats to women’s economic independence’1999: 50–5). Even in the best circumstances, out-migrating women cannot significantly draw on the support of their natal families, resulting in greater isolation and risk of abuse. This situation is particularly salient for rural women, who migrate outward from poor inner rural areas to more prosperous regional centres for marriage. About 30 per cent of Chinese women who migrate do so to marry (Davin 1999: 138; Gilmartin and Lin 2002: 203–16). This migration is fuelled in part by the resur- gent practice of buying and selling rural women as brides, a practice the government disapproves of, but is unable to halt (Biddulph and Cook 1999: 1437–68). 64 Margaret Y. K. Woo The renewed commodification of women in China today is illustrated by the fact that at China’s borders, where supplies are highest, the sale of a young woman can command prices ranging from US$250 to $800 (Marshall 1999: A1). The second form of migration taking place in China is the reverse migration of women from the public to the private sphere, as state policies encourage female workers to leave the state-sector workplace and enter the private space of the home and the hearth (Woo 2000: 312–14). This reverse migration has resulted in a decline in women’s participation in the formal political sphere workplace. As of 1997, China had just three female ministers and 14 deputy-vice ministers in the central government, 23 female vice provincial governors, and 375 female mayors or deputy mayors in its 640-odd cities. Yet women made up about 33 per cent of the total government workforce (United Nations 1997). China’s economic reforms also have led to redundancies in the workforce, with female workers bearing the brunt of this change. Women are often the last to be hired and first to be laid off, the stated reason being that women are less desirable because they are more expensive, due to state-mandated maternity leave and other benefits (Doder 1989: 36). Additionally, economic reform and the resultant increase in wage variations have contributed to increases in gender-based wage differentials, with female workers in 1999 earning an average of only 70 per cent of men’s pay, a sharp decrease from the 83 per cent they earned in 1990 (East Asia Environmental and Social Development Unit 2002: 19). The expanding market economy has further fuelled this reverse migration by commodifying women as beauty objects. As beauty objects, women are viewed as consumers as well as products, who are relegated to the roles of wives and mistresses, rather than assuming roles as equal workers ‘holding up half the sky’, as they supposedly did during the Mao era (1949–1976). This view has led women to be valued simply for their youth and beauty and serves as a justification for denying them employment. In many cases, women at forty have been termed ‘too old’ or ‘too fat’ to be hired (Rosenthal 1998: A1). Reports also indicate that this relocation of women to the private sphere of the home may be adding to women’s vulnerability to domestic violence, spousal infidelity and loss of financial autonomy. A 1994 survey by the Beijing Society for Research on Marriage and the Family suggests that one fifth of the wives among the 2,100 families they surveyed had been abused by their spouses (Li Xiaohua 1995: 1–11). Reports of extramarital affairs have grown, as has the number of divorces, with the number of divorces in 1996 hitting 1.13 million, compared to 389,000 in 1980 (‘Chinese women lose out in divorce under current laws’ 1997). In divorce, women can suffer both financial and emotional setbacks, in part because they often receive the short end of property and housing divisions. The economic and physical migration of Chinese women in the reform era thus has increased their geographical dislocation and correspondingly impacted on their social and sexual identities. These shifts are reflected in the way women view marriage, their role in the family, and their role vis-à-vis the state as they attempt to manoeuvre through the regulations dealing with marriage and divorce. Accordingly, the next section of this chapter discusses the changing parameters of the PRC’s Marriage Laws and laws pertaining to women’s rights. Contesting citizenship 65

Marriage laws and women’s rights In traditional China, marriage was the result of an agreement between two families rather than between two individuals; similarly, relevant family members negotiated divorces (Diamant 2000). This pattern began to change when the newly established People’s Republic of China (PRC) instituted the Marriage Law of 1950 (Meijer 1978: 440; Watson and Ebrey 1991). As one of the first laws implemented by the communist state, the 1950 Marriage Law broke with tradition by terminating the ‘feudal’ practice of arranged marriages and empowering women to initiate divorce proceedings. In the process, however, the state replaced the family as the decision-maker, which in turn reformulated the purpose of marriage in distinctly socialist terms, thereby impacting the rationales acceptable for initiating divorce. Following the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the work unit1 displaced the family, and ideas about nationalism and nation building replaced family authority and interests (Meijer 1978; Naughton 1997: 169–71; Williams and Woo 1995: 510–11). Marriage and divorce became highly politicized as ‘the state tried to use new family regulations and other incentives to mould a new sort of citizen and the relationship between the family and the state’ (Diamant 2000: 17). People were even instructed to consider the broader political implications of their decisions regarding marriage and the family (ibid.). Divorce was not a decision to be based on one’s personal and private individual happiness. Instead, divorce needed to advance the greater goal of the socialist collective and be considered within the broader context of existing political campaigns. Thus, despite its initial liberating effect for women, the 1950 Marriage Law subsequently subjected marriage and divorce to political interpretations, providing divorce only when there was a ‘proper’ reason (ibid.: 314). The All-China Women’s Federation (hereafter the Women’s Federation), 2 in particular, gave high priority to ideology and propaganda and moved from its former role as an advocate for residents seeking assistance with family disputes (ibid.: 213; Johnson 1983: 147). Women, more so among urban elites than the rural population, came to believe that divorces were more damaging to their interests than remaining married, except when they needed a political divorce from a spouse who was deemed to be counter-revolutionary (Honig and Hershatter 1988: 206–7; Johnson 1983: 147). Divorce was further discouraged in post-1949 China by a general decrease in access to legal institutions as a means of settling disputes. Between 1954 and 1979, few women in socialist China utilized any formal legal process, including legal divorce (Diamant 2000: 216). Divorce rates remained quite low, and divorces were usually mutually agreed upon, and then granted by the local marriage registration office under the Bureau of Civil Affairs (Meijer 1978: 465). Furthermore, work units, the Women’s Federation, or neighbourhood residents committees, exhaustively mediated ‘ordinary’ disputes, such as divorces (Diamant 2000: 206). The state approach to divorce altered once again with the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In 1978, along with the development of a market-oriented economy, China re-instituted the legal system that had been dismantled during the 66 Margaret Y. K. Woo Cultural Revolution. The 1980 Marriage Law was one of the first non-economic laws to be implemented during this reform. Article 25 of that Law provided for divorce upon a showing that emotions or mutual affections were broken (ganqing polie) (Quanguo renda 1980). This standard for divorce theoretically enabled parties to seek a divorce without a showing of any social or political misconduct, and focused the granting of divorce on the deteriorating relationship between the individual parties themselves, instead of the relationship between the individual and the state. In practice, however, petitions for divorce according to the 1980 Marriage Law provisions relating to ‘broken emotions’ encountered conceptual difficulties that hindered women’s abilities to initiate divorce. Finally, in 1989, the Supreme People’s Court issued several guidelines, clarifying what the lower courts should consider when assessing whether or not the marital emotions are broken, and, once the parameters of the ‘broken emotions’ doctrine were elucidated, divorce petitions skyrocketed. The Supreme People’s Court outlined the following considerations: (1) the foundation of marriage — whether it was voluntarily or arranged; (2) relations after the marriage; (3) the reason for divorce — whether there was fault on the part of the defending party; and (4) the possibility of reconciliation (Zuigao renmin fayuan 1989). The directive also identified 14 different situations in which a breakdown in marital relations might be said to have occurred. The divorce rate in big cities soared from three per cent in 1978 to close to 20 per cent in 1995 (Liu Yinglang 1997). On paper at least, the laws relating to family and marriage in reform-era China appear favourable to women. Both the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests (hereafter the Women’s Rights Law) and the 1980 Marriage Law guarantee the freedom of marriage and divorce (see Zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyinfa, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo funü quanyi baozhangfa 1994). In a divorce, these laws specify that special consideration should be given to women and children in the division of property and housing. For example, Article 31 of the 1980 Marriage Law stipulates that the division of the couple’s shared property should be handled through consultation, with the court making judgements on a case-by-case basis, while ‘giving special care to the wife and children’s interests’(Quanguo renda 1980). The 1980 Marriage Law even prohibits ‘the husband from filing for divorce during the wife’s pregnancy or within a year of delivery’ (ibid.). Similarly, Article 43 of the Women’s Rights Law stipulates that ‘women have exactly the same rights as their spouses to occupy, use, benefit from, and dispose of all shared property, whatever their income’ (Zhonghua renmin ... 1994). This legal protection is especially necessary for women who, upon marriage, face discrimination in the distribution of valuable housing and village land rights. Nevertheless, divorced women continue to be left without property or housing. Significantly, although the divorce process itself is a relatively simple matter, the new understanding that divorce is both a community matter and a private matter between private individuals complicates this process. There are two methods for obtaining divorce in China, the xieyi (agreement) system and the more formal court system. The degree to which each is availed of by divorce Contesting citizenship 67 petitioners illustrates the changing perceptions of divorce and the legal system, since each method provides its own perceived advantages and disadvantages. Under the xieyi system, the parties, if they both agree, can file for a divorce by seeking permission from the marriage registration office of the Bureau of Civil Affairs, located at their place of residence (Quanguo renda 1980, Article 24). To commence the xieyi process, the petitioning couple bring their request to the marriage registration office along with their identification, residence card, and an introduction letter from their work unit or residence committee, and their marriage certificate (Regulation of the administration of marriage registration 1985, Article 14). The registration office must give an answer within a month, but will first conduct informal mediation, counselling and/or education for the petitioning couple (Quanguo renda 1980, Article 16). If reconciliation after mediation is unlikely, a divorce will be granted. Until recently, most couples preferred the xieyi system to court litigation when seeking a divorce, but divorces in present-day China are increasingly being litigated in the courts rather than being resolved administratively and informally, partly because private litigants want to avoid the excessive mediation and intrusive involvement of community organizations. Even in the courts, however, divorce petitions must first be mediated under court authorities, and sometimes with the involvement of relevant units, such as the parties’ work units, labour unions, or women’s federation (Quanguo renda 1980, Article 25). In theory, this mediation step is voluntary. During mediation, courts are to investigate the case and try to reconcile the parties before making a judicial determination. If reconciliation is not possible, the court then proceeds to rule on the divorce petition, including ruling on the division of property between the parties. Parties dissatisfied with the court judgement may appeal to a court of the next level within fifteen days. These processes for divorce remain unchanged under the PRC’s amended 2001 Marriage Law, even though this Law attempts to address some of the problems faced by women as individual litigants in contested divorces. This Law clarifies the grounds for divorce, determining what constitutes joint property, and identifying parental custody and visitation rights. But it also brings back community norms of fault by punishing at-fault parties in divorce and providing victims with the right to sue for compensation and the division of property (Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China 2001). While statistical and other large-scale research endeavours highlight the profound changes currently occurring within the Chinese legal system, they tend to overlook the issue of how individual women experience these transformations. The next section of this chapter therefore examines the experiences of 29 divorce litigants from different areas of Shanghai and different sectors of society, whom I interviewed in conjunction with historian Christina Gilmartin in 1998. Our interviewees ranged in age from 29 to 64 years old. Their lengths of marriages ranged from less than one year to 35 years. All of the interviewees had received some formal education. Six of the interviewees obtained their divorces through the informal xieyi system, and 22 through the more formal court process. 68 Margaret Y. K. Woo To supplement our interview data, we also interviewed court officials, lawyers, and administrators from the Bureau of Civil Affairs, as well as Chinese legal scholars in the area of family law. Taken together, the data provide insights regarding the state of divorces and family formation in urban China, and the legal process facing female litigants in urban China today.

Divorce in China Who is petitioning for a divorce in China’s courts? In our interview group, women were plaintiffs in 20 cases and men were plaintiffs in nine. This finding is consistent with national statistics, as well as Shanghai’s own statistics, which reveal that women are usually the initiators of divorce petitions. One court official we interviewed estimated that female plaintiffs in divorce cases constitute 70 per cent of all the divorce cases filed in Shanghai (Interview, Zhabei District Court Judge, 15 May 1998). In Zhabei District Court alone, our sources estimated that divorce petitions constituted more than half of the caseload, with female plaintiffs in 90 per cent of the cases. Nationally, according to the statistics of the Supreme People’s Court, women were the petitioners in nearly 70 per cent of the divorce cases tried by the civil courts since 1980 (Yang and Guo 2000: 522). Although women are taking the initiative in the vast majority of the divorce cases filed in China today, this does not necessarily mean that women wish to divorce more than men. According to our interviewees, some women initiate divorce because they do not want to be perceived as ‘victims’ and think it would be in their best interest to take proactive steps. One woman stated that initiating a divorce was a way to take charge of the situation and she expressed relief at taking herself out of a bad marriage and starting anew (Interview S-2, 13 May 1998). In this most private of all issues, Chinese women, at least in urban areas such as Shanghai, are stepping forward to claim their legal rights to marital freedom. While modernization theories suggest that people with less education might be less inclined to assert their rights, seek legal assistance, or otherwise use formal court processes (Shorter 1975: 214–15), our interview respondents indicate that Chinese intellectuals may feel more bound by traditional precepts and more hesitant to resort to the ‘uncivil’ conduct of litigation than workers. At least two of the ten university-educated interviewees expressed the belief that it was more ‘civilized’ to settle the matter privately, quietly, and without controversy (Interview S-5, 13 May 1998; Interview S-28, 4 June 1998). Since courts can provide more anonymity than xieyi divorces, these educated litigants would go to court, but would not ‘fight’ over property or other issues. One university-educated litigant even expressed the view that lawyer involvement represents a failure of sorts (Interview S-5, 13 May 1998). In contrast, workers may be more inclined to use lawyers and the formal legal process because they feel powerless and need the court for protection (Diamant 2000: 330). Financial independence may prove a more significant factor than education level in Chinese women’s decisions to bring suit. Of the divorce litigants we interviewed, female initiators of divorce ranged in age from 29 to 48. Members of the Contesting citizenship 69 Jiading District of the Shanghai Women’s Federation estimated that the bulk of divorce litigants ranged in age from 20 to 40 (Interview, 13 May 1998). According to Li Weisha (1989: 84–93), litigants tend to be those who ‘have their own income and are able to lead an independent life. [T]hese women are imperceptibly influenced every day by traditional culture, including traditional ideas on marriage … [yet] they show a strong and non-traditional inclination for self-determination’. In short, market reforms and the resultant migratory trends have led to a limited measure of financial autonomy and freedom for Chinese women, which has made it possible for some to ‘buy out’ of unhappy marriages (Davin 1999: 15). What are the reasons given for bringing divorce petitions to court? According to national studies, the main grounds for divorce include bigamy, adultery, alcohol and gambling addictions, and long-time working abroad (Li Xiaohua 1995: 43). In today’s China, then, expectations about love, marriage, and individual self- fulfilment appear increasingly important (see also the chapter by Pan Suiming in this volume). With increasing economic freedom, and the withdrawal of the Chinese state from people’s private lives, China is seeing a rise in reports of extramarital affairs. This is reflected in the changing terminology from ‘meddling in marriages’ (disanzhe chazu) to ‘the third party’ (disanzhe) to ‘love outside the marriage’ (hunwailian) (Yang Gang 2000: 92–4). In one urban area, the Jiading District of Shanghai, members of the Women’s Federation that we interviewed said the divorce rate in 1997 exceeded the marriage rate (Interview, 15 May 1998). They also believed extramarital affairs motivated divorce in over half of these cases. While reports of extramarital affairs have grown, so, too, have reports of family violence. According to a study by the All-China Women’s Federation, domestic violence may be a factor in 30 per cent of Chinese families, and 50–60 per cent of all divorces (Jiang 1993: 19–20). Domestic violence, however, was not the major factor for the divorce litigants we interviewed. Of the 20 petitions brought by women, seven explicitly cited domestic violence and two cited abandonment as motivations for pursuing divorce. The rest pointed to reasons of incompatibility (xingge buhe), or more frequently, extramarital affairs. This may be because domestic violence is still viewed as a problem that requires education, not divorce. Nonetheless, there is an increasing recognition in present-day China that personality and emotional well-being can be key reasons for divorce. Marriage for free love is overtaking arranged marriages and even ‘intermediary’ marriages (marriage through matchmakers). In the economically developed southeast, the proportion of marriages based on free love is higher than 70 per cent, and arranged marriages no longer exist (Yang and Guo 2000: 503). Reform and greater freedom have led not only to possibilities of greater chasms in relations, but also to greater expectations for what a marriage should be and a growing sense of entitlement that those expectations be met. It is important to note, however, that while seeking a divorce is no longer difficult for Chinese urban women, the same may not be the case for women in rural areas. In underdeveloped areas, arranged marriages still comprise the majority of marriages. Chinese women in rural areas still face substantial interference with 70 Margaret Y. K. Woo their legal rights. According to an investigation of the Wulian Court in Shangdong Province, husbands and/or relatives ‘interfered with’ at least 84 cases, or 27.6 per cent of the 308 divorce cases tried by the court (ibid.: 524). Methods of obstruction ranged from the threat or use of direct force, to instances of jailing, binding or holding the women in custody. Despite the legal protections on paper, women in China can suffer both financial and emotional setbacks in a divorce because they often receive the short end of property and housing divisions. The housing problem for women in divorce is attributable to a combination of factors, including housing shortages, residual effects of the work-unit housing allocation system, and traditional virilocal patterns of residence after marriage, in which women live with or near the husband’s family after marriage. Until recently, most housing was distributed by the work units, which under the rationale of avoiding double allocation, often refused to allocate housing to married women. Under this distribution system, women received fewer housing vouchers and were ineligible for newly constructed homes (Croll 1995: 158). As women workers are often the first to be fired and last to be hired, women also face early retirement or unemployment. Unemployment, in turn, has meant that women are least financially able to have independent housing or to be affiliated with a work unit, which could provide housing. According to a recent study on housing and divorce in the state sector, where public housing allocation is most likely to occur, husbands are 2.6 per cent more likely to receive housing than wives (Liu Donghua (n.d.)). Under a system of state-allocated housing, divorces were and are an administrative nuisance, as work units cannot command additional housing units to meet the demands of a divorce. Thus, until well into the 1990s, the role of the work units in a couple’s marital living situation was such that ‘many or most court and civil affairs offices required a letter of permission from the spouses’ work unit before they would process the divorce request, even when the couple was in agreement’ (Goode 1993: 311). Not surprisingly, property and especially housing often become the bargaining chips in contested divorces. More than one female interviewee mentioned facing pressure to compromise and give up rightful property before the other party agreed to the divorce (Interview S-8, 19 May 1998; Interview S-10, 19 May 1998). This is problematic, as women need housing both to enjoy freedom and to provide income and shelter for their children (Tinker 1999: 9). Thus, the fastest divorces are often those with minimal property and/or housing disputes. These cases are funnelled through the administrative xieyi system, with the parties registering their divorce agreement with the marriage registration office of the Bureau of Civil Affairs. Some of the most difficult divorce cases deal with the division of housing and, consequently, require legal assistance and are handled in the courts. Indeed, close to 30 per cent of the women who go to the Beijing University’s Centre for Women’s Law Studies and Legal Services for assistance with their divorce raised concerns relating to their housing (‘Five Year Consulting Report’ (n.d)). Our interviewees with no housing problems received divorces quickly, with minimal assistance. Contesting citizenship 71 The Supreme People’s Court, the highest court in China, found it necessary in 1993 and then, once again, in 1996, to issue directives which protect women’s rights as leaseholders of public housing if their marriages have lasted for five or more years. These directives urge the courts to consider equity when dividing common housing by requiring a living allowance or requiring both people to live in the shared home for up to two years after divorce while they arrange for other housing. This has proven to be a problem in instances of domestic violence, where the victim must share housing with the batterer. Yet, although these directives emphasize equitable division of common housing rental rights, in reality those rights ultimately belong to the work units, which have been known to interfere with women’s legal rights by avoiding the transfer of homes (Warren 1999: 137). As Ann Jordan (1994: 73) notes, as long as housing remains a work-related benefit, the divorce provisions contained in the PRC’s Marriage Law and the Women’s Rights Law will be ineffective. Even the recent movement to privatize the housing market has not entirely eliminated the problem of housing for female divorcées. Despite housing reforms, Shanghai still faces acute housing shortages (Fei 1999: 198–9). An investigation in the Dongchen District of Shanghai in 1997, for instance, concluded that in 10 sub-districts, 61.1 per cent of divorced women had no housing (ibid.: 205). Women experiencing domestic violence confront even greater problems, since the number of women’s shelters in China is limited (Zhao 2001: 248). In short, women have responded to China’s changing sexual mores and associated legal reforms by carving out spheres of autonomy through the adjudication process that may be unexpected and sometimes unwelcome. The following case – that of Z (male, interviewee S-13) and L – hints at the difficult issues facing Chinese couples in a divorce today. It does so by highlighting the interplay between domestic violence, housing pressures, and the limitations of the court process in resolving such disputes.

The experiences of Chinese litigants Z and L were middle-school classmates and married in 1983. In 1984, they had a daughter. In 1997, after 14 years of marriage, L filed for divorce. As grounds for the divorce, L claimed domestic violence by Z, as well as ‘broken marital emotions’, pursuant to the 1980 Marriage Law. In support of her petition, L alleged that her husband frequently beat her, even in the month after she gave birth. In 1993, L sought the assistance of her work unit, which tried to mediate the dispute by issuing a document to the defendant directing him to refrain from abuse. The document was enclosed as evidence in the divorce petition. In the latter half of 1996, Z developed a habit of going to saunas (a known front for commercial sexual services in China); and, when L objected, he would hit her. On 2 May 1998, L alleged that the defendant beat their fourteen-year-old daughter when she accidentally broke a rice bowl. L additionally alleged abuse on 5 May, when she claimed Z beat her when she was too tired to clean the house. L sought custody of her daughter, child support payments of 300 yuan (approximately 72 Margaret Y. K. Woo US$31) a month, as well as proper distribution of marital property, including the couple’s apartment. The defendant Z did not contest the divorce or custody of his daughter, but he did contest the division of property. In his response, Z challenged the distribution of the marital property and alleged that L had engaged in domestic abuse of his elderly great aunt. Z’s great aunt Y also intervened as third party to object to certain property (an air conditioner, a heater, an easy chair, a telephone and a pager) being designated as marital property. Y maintained that she had paid for these items herself, and thus they remained her property. The divorce process began when the court telephoned Z at his home to notify him of the petition. Z picked up the divorce petition on 9 June. A day later, two judges spent one hour with the family cataloguing the household property. On 18 June, the parties had a two-hour hearing with one judge and one secretary present. At that meeting, L’s work unit testified. Relatives of both parties were also present. Z brought a lawyer and his brother-in-law, and L brought a representative from her work unit and a former classmate. There was some minimal effort to mediate the matter by the court. The court simply asked if the parties agreed on the divorce and, since they did, moved quickly to discuss the division of property. Because the parties could not agree on a property division, subsequent hearings were held on 29 September and 27 November. The allocation of the family apartment, which was still occupied by Z, L, their daughter, and Z’s great aunt Y, proved to be a bitterly contested issue. The apartment consisted of four rooms of varying sizes: one room on the first floor, plus a southwest room, a middle south room, and a north room, on the second floor. The landing, kitchen, bathroom, and balcony were considered to be common spaces. By the time a decision was rendered on 29 December, both parties had retained lawyers. Citing articles 25, 29, 30, and 31 of the 1980 Marriage Law, the district court awarded the divorce and made the following findings (Quanguo renda 1980). The court awarded custody of the daughter to L and ordered Z to pay monthly child support of 300 yuan. The contested property (air conditioner, heater, easy chair, etc.) was deemed marital property because Y was not able to provide receipts to prove ownership. Nevertheless, Z and L agreed to give the easy chair and heater to Y. After investigation, the district court found that the apartment had originally belonged to Z’s grandmother, and that Z had inherited the apartment in 1993 after her death. In dividing the property, the court awarded the first floor room (8.9 square metres) and the second floor southwest room (8.7 square metres) to L and her daughter. Z and his great aunt received the middle south room (23.7 square metres) and the north room (16.4 square metres). The court then awarded the remaining property, including an eight-piece mahogany furniture set, to Z, but ordered Z to pay 20,000 yuan to L in compensation. L filed a timely appeal in which she contested the division of the apartment and certain furniture. L argued that the apartment had been unfairly divided because she and her daughter were awarded the two smallest rooms, totally 17.6 square metres, with Z’s rooms totalling 40.1 square metres. L sought a redivision, in which the Contesting citizenship 73 north room (16.4 square metres) and the southwest room (8.9 square metres) went to L, and the central south room (23.7 square metres) and the southwest room (8.7 square metres) went to Z. The present division, argued L, deprived her of her legal rights and unfairly interfered with her ability to raise and educate her daughter. L also contested the award of the mahogany furniture to Z. She claimed this furniture was marital property and should be divided as such. In response, Z’s lawyer (a woman) filed papers arguing that the award of the mahogany furniture was fair, because the furniture was valued at 40,950 yuan and Z had been ordered to give L 20,000 yuan in compensation. As for the division of housing, Z’s lawyer made three arguments. First, she argued that in this situation, Y’s legal interest was separate from Z’s. Y, she said, was a separate family unit, and thus must be awarded housing independently of Z. Z’s lawyer argued that the southwest room should not be considered part of the marital property, but rather Y’s property, because Y had lived in that room since 1934. A letter from the residence committee, a neighbour’s testimony, and Y’s own testimony, were submitted as supporting evidence. Second, Z’s lawyer argued that Z must be awarded the north room because the north and the southwest rooms were connected, forcing one to walk through the southwest room to get to the north room. Because Y required constant medical attention, the lawyer argued that Z must live in the room closest to Y in order to care for her. Finally, Z and his lawyer argued that since L had been maltreating Y for the past few years, it would be impractical to put her in the room next to Y’s. Z added that he should be allowed to remain in the southwest room, since he had lived in that room since the two were married. Z’s further countered that if L argued that the property division would harm her ability to raise her daughter, the court should award custody to Z, who would not seek any child support from L. At the time of our interview, Z was quite frustrated with the court and the length of the divorce process. He resented having to pay a 50 yuan initial court filing fee and an additional 1,450 yuan because the amount of the contested property was high, as well as 800 yuan for the investigation (the parties would not have to split the fees until the end of the case). He had also expended over 2,000 yuan in lawyer fees to date. While the case was pending, L did not allow him to see his daughter, and when he complained to court, the judge said, ‘nothing could be done’. At the time of the interviews, no decision was in sight. When asked to score the court’s work on a scale of one to ten, Z gave the court a score of five. Two general observations can be made from this case. First, lengthy and complicated procedures did not seem to deter the parties, contrary to accepted notions that Confucian ideology shuns litigation. Second, the litigation in this case reflects changes in the legal system itself. The case began as a community matter involving mediation and the involvement of the work units, but was subsequently filed in court, where it became more of a private matter between individuals. In the courts, the work units retained some influence, but their role in the process was substantially reduced. The work units primarily served a 74 Margaret Y. K. Woo testamentary function, in which they were called upon to give evidence to a final arbitrator, in this case the court itself, rather than acting as the primary problem solvers themselves, as they had in the past. This and other cases suggest that some individuals in present-day China are experiencing increased liberation from work-unit control and are instead relying on outside institutions, such as the courts, for dispute resolution. In fact, several litigants mentioned that they preferred to go to court because it could be simpler without the involvement of the work unit (e.g. Interview S-23, 31 May 1998; Interview S-28, 4 June 1998). Many of our interviewees also stated that divorce should take place between individuals, not collectives. However, interview responses suggest that work units and residence committees continue to play an important – albeit reduced – role. Collective organizations are often called in to give evidence, particularly with reference to the issue of housing, and courts consider their credibility high. Moreover, interviews with lawyers suggest that when the Women’s Federation gets involved, it is often to the benefit of the women, suggesting that members of the Women’s Federation may be adopting the new role of acting as advocates or witnesses in the court system rather than working strictly as mediators (Interview, Jiading Women’s Federation, 15 May 1998). This role may prove important since most divorces in China still must first go through mediation, and the number of mediated divorces remains large, even though the number of adjudicated divorces is increasing. The case of Z and L also reflects the increasingly accepted view of the family in China as a ‘nuclear family’, with the husband and wife as the core, since the elderly aunt Y’s interest was ultimately argued as a separate interest apart from those of the husband and wife. Certainly, the average size of the Chinese family has decreased from 4.51 persons per family in 1982 to 3.63 in 1998, with over 76.54 per cent of the families in China comprised of four or fewer persons (Chen 2000: 7). Bi-generational families (usually parents with unmarried children) have replaced multi-generational families and now constitute 62.83 per cent of the families in China. In the courts, and in divorce litigation, the relevant interests increasingly are those of the individual litigants. Unsurprisingly, those involved in more complicated and contested divorces seek legal assistance more frequently. As indicated by Z’s rating of the legal process at five out of ten, the level of satisfaction with the legal process by the litigants is mixed. Naturally, those who get what they want tend to be more satisfied with the process, while those with problems tend to be less satisfied with the courts. Those who were satisfied with their court process commented that their judge was ‘sympathetic’ or ‘warm’ (Interview S-12, S-17, S-18, S-10, May 1998). In contrast, interviewees with varying outcomes commented that their judge seemed ‘cold and bureaucratic’, or was ‘simply an administrator’ with ‘no understanding’ (Interview S-3, S-7, S-8, S-9, S-12, S-16, S-17, S-18, May 1998). A husband who petitioned three times before getting a divorce was very dissatisfied with the process (Interview S-7, 18 May 1998). One woman thought that her husband who was ‘fierce’ had gotten his way, and criticized the judge as simply an administrator who ‘gave in’ to her husband (Interview S-9, 19 May 1998). A second thought the judge was too ‘young’ and that her ‘privacy was invaded’ by the process (Interview S-8, 19 May 1998). Contesting citizenship 75 One thought that her husband, a cadre, had influenced the judge (Interview S-19, 24 May 1998). Another thought the judge did not treat her well because she was too ‘fashionable’ (Interview S-15, 22 May 1998). Comments expressing dissatisfaction with the divorce process relate more to the professionalism and competence of judges, rather than general dissatisfaction with going to court or viewing adjudication as a personal failure. The basis of these complaints seems to be that judges are either unprofessional or too professional. While some complained that the judges were too young, and lacked understanding (Interview S-8, 19 May 1998), others complained that the judge acted ‘too simply’, or ‘too quickly’ (Interview S-25, 1 June 1998). These litigants felt that their voices or stories were not heard, and, consequently, their participation was limited. In contrast, litigants who know what they want or are determined to obtain a specific settlement are more likely to succeed in court. Hence, the female litigants we interviewed who were determined to divorce and who held their ground largely succeeded in obtaining divorces (Interview S-24, 1 June 1998; Interview S-25, 1 June 1998), whereas litigants who did not or could not hold their ground had to give up property and custody in order to obtain divorces (Interview S-5 13 May 1998; Interview S-8, 19 May 1998). The fact that Chinese women are litigating in the courts, often against the odds, suggests complex calculations on the part of female litigants and a changing role for courts in China. Increasingly, the Chinese state is encouraging the use of courts, which it sees as integral to a stable society and consistent with its goal of reining in local bureaucrats. The Supreme People’s Court Report (1996: 26) decreed that Chinese courts should ‘further improve the work of trying civil cases, protect the civil rights and interests of citizens and legal persons according to the law, and promote the just, safe, civilized, and healthy development of society’. This is a far cry from the sentiments of 1950s, when disputes were directed away from the formal legal system and handled informally.

Divorces under the New Marriage Law Today, Chinese women are initiating divorces and voicing their social and sexual rights under the PRC’s Marriage Law. In doing so, they speak a new, personal language of ‘self-fulfilment’ and express the view that divorce and marriage are a private matter between two parties. Hence, they seek divorces when ‘emotions are broken’ and when extramarital affairs infringe on their marital rights They also seek to assert their rights in the courts as they try to avoid the prying eyes of the work unit and other collectivist organizations. The court process, in turn, treats women and men as autonomous individuals, much like the market process. In the formal legal process, Chinese judges are conducting fewer and fewer investigations, relying more on individual litigants to supply proof, and not ordinarily questioning the fairness of mediated outcomes. The problem, however, is that in operating on the market model of individual- ism and self-reliance, the Chinese legal system reflects the same inequity found in the market. For example, the number of Chinese lawyers remains low and 76 Margaret Y. K. Woo poorly distributed. Most Chinese cases are litigated without the assistance of counsel. In 1995, of the 4,889,353 cases filed, lawyers reportedly participated in just 863,574 (Zhongguo falü nianjian 1996). In 1999, lawyers handled 20,173 of the 190,502 civil cases of the first instance (Zhongguo falü nianjian 2000). Furthermore, lawyers in China hesitate to take on divorce cases, viewing them as unprofitable and difficult to resolve (Interview, Fudan University Legal Aid Office, 22 May 1998; Interview, Shanghai City Women’s Federation, 12 May 1998). Additionally, while a sizable number of lawyers are found in urban areas such as Shanghai, a lawyer is a scarce commodity in rural areas. For example, while there are 3,522 full-time lawyers in the city of Shanghai alone, there are only 1,220 lawyers in the entire province of Guizhou (Zhongguo sifa xingzheng nianjian 2001). Allowing the market to determine the distribution of legal services may mean a misdistribution of justice for female litigants in need. And so, the formal divorce process has not necessarily increased women’s well- being. Since women face unequal economic powers and have fewer resources to make their stories heard, either in terms of hiring lawyers or in finding proof, the movement towards a formal process and the placement of burdens of proof on individual parties has not worked to the advantage of women seeking divorces. These women face husbands hiding assets, the danger of being left homeless, and pressure to give up custody and property in the hopes of obtaining a simpler divorce. In the divorce litigation process, female litigants faced an uphill battle. Will women continue to utilize the rights accorded to them by the legal system and will the system operate effectively to protect their rights? Some answers may be provided by the 2001 amendment to the Marriage Law. In China, state policies toward marriage reform and the dissolution of marriage have matched each new period of social and political change. In the 1950s, the Marriage Law was heralded in to destroy the feudal establishment and to re-establish the new socialist citizen. In 1980, the Marriage Law was again revised to redress the past abuses of the Cultural Revolution, and then operated together with changing economic policies to foster increasing use of the courts. Most recently, in 2001, the Marriage Law was again amended, this time reacting to the privatization of family and personal relations, and, subsequently, reinserting the state back into this ‘private’ realm. Significantly, the PRC’s amended Marriage Law of 2001 attempted to address some areas where women had faced problems within the operation of the 1980 Marriage Law. In many other ways, the amendment law reverts back to a more moralistic fault-based system with a renewed focus on collectivist mechanisms. For example, Article 2 reaffirms the value of a monogamous marital heterosexual by defining marriage as a voluntary relationship entered between a man and a woman (Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China 2001). Article 3, however, recognizes the changing nature of sexual conduct in China by prohibiting bigamy and the cohabitation of a married person with a third party, as well as mercenary marriage, family violence and abandonment (ibid.). In a tone that is reminiscent of the collectivist era, one commentator notes that these provisions are necessary because ‘marriage and family’ are the ‘cell’ of society, and its ‘stability is foundational to society’s stability’. Indeed, the guiding Contesting citizenship 77 principle for divorce and marriage law is that marriage is the basis of family and family makes up social ‘cells’. ‘The stability of marriage and family, therefore, directly or indirectly influences social stability’ (Feng 2002: 331–98; see also the chapter by Pan Suiming in this volume). Interestingly, where economic policies have caused disruption to family relations, it was the marriage law rather than economic policies that is changed. There are also procedural provisions in the 2001 Marriage Law that augur a return to community control mechanisms. In redressing domestic violence, the 2001 Marriage Law emphasizes both collectivist and state remedies. Victims of domestic violence can petition to relevant organizations, such as residence committees and work units, for mediation, or alternatively, may seek criminal prosecution (Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China 2001, Article 32). While Chinese women facing domestic violence may seek the intervention of social organizations, they have to accept the accompanying influence of those organizations on the results in their cases (ibid.). This Law also deals squarely for the first time with domestic violence, by placing the issue within the authority of the courts. Judges can no longer hide behind the old proverb, ‘qingguan nanduan jiawushi’ (even the wisest judge cannot rule on family matters). Furthermore, Article 46 of the 2001 Marriage Law provides for actual judicial remedies against the infringing party – punishment of a party who attempts to conceal joint property to prevent a fair division of property in divorce, and allows a party without fault the right to request compensation from a spouse who has committed bigamy, illegal cohabitation, family violence, or desertion (ibid.). The 2001 Marriage Law may be one measure by which the Chinese State attempts to swing the pendulum back from a more individualist focus to a more collectivist one. Whether the amended Marriage Law proves to be more effective in protecting women’s social and sexual rights, however, will depend on whether and how women continue to interpret and utilize legal instruments for their rights. Ultimately, formal law and legal procedures (whether individualistic or collectivist based) by themselves are insufficient. China must determine what priority it will give to equality, women’s rights protections, and other redistributive goals, even when these goals conflict with other state goals, such as economic development and nation-building. China’s social priorities are especially tested when the hierarchy of conflicting social goals is determined through the enforcement of formal legal provisions, rather than through changing economic policies.

Conclusion In the market-oriented economic era of the 1990s, China witnessed an increase in formal civil litigation and in the privatization of family and personal relations as female litigants turned to the courts in petitioning for divorces. The formal legal process, more than informal mediation, focuses on assertions of private, individual rights. Since adjudication captures moments of conflict and the institutional and social content of these moments, it is not only a source of private 78 Margaret Y. K. Woo dispute resolution, but also a process by which these rights are determined and articulated. Chinese litigants, and especially Chinese women, have taken advantage of these moments. However, as so often happens when change is brought on an individual basis, women are at a disadvantage. Now that state structures that once militated against discrimination have been dismantled, women may be left hostage to prevailing gender bias in the courts. Greater access to legal aid and the availability of means of redress under law are critical to ensure equal assertions of gender rights and equality. The present distribution of legal services presents clear obstacles to the assertion of rights. Additional legal education programmes are needed both to determine what women’s substantive rights are and also how to enforce them. Such programmes should be addressed not only to Chinese women, but also to the entire legal system. Such programmes should include discussions not only about women’s legal but sexual rights. Issues such as ‘domestic violence’ and ‘marital rape’ can no longer be hidden under the blinkers of tradition. Neither the market nor the state will provide any greater protection for women unless old social institutions adopt new practices, or newly established social institutions become more conducive to rights assertion and discussion. True legal reforms cannot take place until the culture of legal rights and the enforcement of these rights are firmly engrained and entrenched in each and every ordinary citizen. For Chinese women, this means an understanding of their legal rights and equality in the social as well as the sexual context.

Notes 1 Editor’s note: during the Maoist period, and for some time after, the majority of urban residents in China were attached to a work unit, which is an enterprise or institution that provided comprehensive care for its employees, in the form of housing, education and health care. Restrictions on labour mobility to suit the requirements of a centralized planned economy meant that most urban Chinese spent their entire life in a given work unit and hence were part of a closed community. 2 Editor’s note: the All-China Women’s Federation was founded by the CCP in 1949. It is described as a mass organization that is ‘dedicated to the advancement of Chinese women of all ethnic groups in all walks of life’ and is charged with the task of representing and protecting women’s rights and interests, and promoting equality between women and men. See the official website of the All-China Women’s Federation at http://www.women.org.cn/english/english/aboutacwf/mulu.htm (accessed 19 December 2005).

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Li Yinhe

Introduction There are no specific laws prohibiting same-sex love (tongxinglian) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).1 Any sexual act that occurs between two consenting adults, and that is conducted in private, is unlikely to attract legal sanctions. However, this does not mean that there are no constraints on the activities of male homosexuals. On the contrary, in China, as with many other countries, the continued social condemnation of homosexuality and family pressure to marry and have children, not only places severe constraints on the lives of male homosexuals, but also can ostracize them from the support of other homosexuals. There is a strong imperative in Chinese culture for sons and daughters to marry and produce descendents. Hence persons erotically inclined to the same-sex often marry opposite-sex partners in order to fulfil their filial obligations and also to deflect public suspicion. Concomitantly, male homosexuals in China have been subjected to varying forms of ‘extra-legal’ sanctions, both in the Maoist period (1949–1976), when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) overturned the then existing criminal code and adopted a system of administrative and Party sanctions; and, in the economic reform period (1978–present), when the Chinese government promulgated a new criminal code and moved towards what is commonly referred to as ‘the rule of law’, as opposed to the Maoist ‘rule of man’. In fact, in China today, as with the Maoist past, the most serious threat to same-sex sexual conduct between consenting male adults comes neither from legal sanctions nor from police arrest in the name of public security, but rather from social prejudice, which has resulted in the arbitrary imposition of administrative penalties and Party disciplinary sanctions. Administrative penalties and Party disciplinary sanctions are a method of social control peculiar to China. They are used to control the activities of those who are deemed to have committed offences against the social order, but whose criminal liability is not viewed as sufficient to bring them before the courts or to warrant a criminal record. Recourse to the Chinese system of administrative penalties and Party disciplinary sanctions has ensured that homosexuality in the PRC has been subject to varying legal and other interpretations. Prior to the introduction of the PRC’s first criminal code on 1 January 1980, there were no precise legal regulations Regulating male same-sex relationships 83 against homosexuality. However, following an interpretation made by the Chinese Supreme Court in February 1956, sodomy (jijianzui)2 was handled as a crime pertaining to non-consensual and/or violent homosexual acts, and acts of same- sex love with minors. A subsequent ruling in 1957 suggested that homosexual acts between consenting adults were not criminal, but added that there were no laws governing this particular issue at the time. In the absence of such laws, local governments proceeded to handle cases of homosexuality in divergent ways (Cai 2000). Many penalized consensual homosexual acts with reference to the system of administrative punishments, which sometimes resulted in people being detained so that their so-called ‘errors’ could be corrected via ‘reform through education and/or labour’. In 1984, China’s legislative organs finally ruled that the specific crime of sodomy should be removed from the criminal code; however, this goal was not realized until the promulgation of the revised Criminal Law in 1997 (ibid.; Gong 2003). The 1997 Criminal Law also deleted any specific reference to the crime of hooliganism (liumangzui), an umbrella term which referred to a wide array of social offences and was often used to penalize homosexuals (Yin 2002; for a further discussion of hooliganism and homosexuality see Dutton 1998: 62–74). Compounding the ambiguous status of homosexuality in Chinese law, same-sex love was defined as a form of mental illness (tongxinglianbing) until April 2001, when references to homosexuality as a mental disorder were removed from Chinese psychiatric texts (Gao 2003). Recent legal and other changes suggest that homosexuality might eventually be accepted in China. Certainly, in April 2000, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security announced that people had the right to choose their own sexuality (ibid.). However, given the recent nature of these changes, and the lack of public knowledge on issues pertaining to homosexual rights, it is not yet possible to say how and when same-sex love will be accepted in practice. This chapter outlines the nature of the social and legal regulation of same-sex love in the PRC. It does so by drawing on interviews that I conducted with male homosexuals between 1989 and 1997 (Li and Wang 1992; Li Yinhe 1998a), rather than providing a detailed overview of legal regulations and statutes. Reference to the real-life stories provided by male homosexuals may seem somewhat partial and limited in scope. But, given the largely ‘closeted’ nature of the lives of homosexuals in China today, it highlights the pressures that they face in their everyday lives. In addition, it points to the need for legal reforms that recognize homosexual rights.

Regulating male homosexuality in the Maoist period (1949–1976) Homosexuals were not an explicit target of social control and political campaigns during the Maoist era, but many suffered harassment and persecution, particularly during the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976). The Cultural Revolution deserves a special mention in any discussion of the regulation of homosexuality 84 Li Yinhe in the PRC. During this period, an enormous number of people were subjected to criticism on the grounds that they had class or political problems. Yet people without any such problems were sometimes subjected to criticism on charges of homosexuality, a sexual persuasion that was not sympathetically understood by most people in China at that time. Moreover, anyone exposed as a homosexual received harsh treatment. Those who got off lightly were criticized and interrogated, whilst those who were not so fortunate were beaten to death. For example, at a certain middle school in Beijing, an art teacher was reputedly beaten to death in August 1966 when it was discovered that he had engaged in same-sex acts with male students. Apart from stories relating to the murder of male homosexuals during the Maoist period, there are various accounts of people being driven to suicide flowing from a fear of, or as a result of, being exposed as a participant in acts of same-sex love. Informant A1 recalled that, in the 1970s, a friend of his had gone to a certain city on business and heard a story that was causing something of a sensation at that time. The story centred on an old married couple, originally cousins, who were already between 50 and 60 years old. One evening, a neighbour of the elderly couple had visitors and sent her young daughter to stay overnight with the old woman (the old man being away on shift-work). The next day the girl revealed that the old woman was actually a man, whereupon the old woman was subsequently detained and investigated on suspicion of being a secret agent. Here, it is important to note that the so-called problem of ‘class revisionism’ and hence fears that China was going backward onto the capitalist road, rather than advancing forward to socialism, was a major concern during the Cultural Revolution period. This concern resulted in many people being terrorized as ‘class enemies’, ‘secret agents’ and so forth, frequently with no foundation whatsoever. In the case of the old woman, after a process of verification, it was demonstrated that ‘she’ was indeed a man. Whilst in detention, the ‘old woman’ decided that he could not live with the humiliation that would accompany public knowledge of his circumstances, i.e. he had no ‘face’, and therefore committed suicide. The next case highlights the kinds of administrative sanctions that male homosexuals were subjected to during the Maoist era. Informant B1 explained that he was formerly in the army, had slept with someone of the same sex, and consequently had received a Party disciplinary warning for committing the mistake of sodomy. Party disciplinary warnings are a severe form of punishment internal to the Chinese Communist Party. Having such a warning attached to your Party file would make promotion and career advancement very difficult, especially at the time when the informant was criticized for making such a ‘mistake’, that is, from 1968 to 1978. Before the introduction of the economic reforms and Open Door Policy in December 1978, the CCP – via the social mechanism of the work unit – was effectively responsible for the allocation of all work; and, in the absence of a criminal code, appeals to courts on the basis of legal jurisprudence, were virtually non-existent. This meant that Regulating male same-sex relationships 85 Party disciplinary sanctions would have had very serious implications for those who received them. In this particular case, Informant B1 tried to appeal the imposition of disciplinary sanctions by requesting that his case be medically diagnosed, but his work unit refused this request. During the Maoist period, most urban residents in China were attached to a work unit, which is an enterprise or institution, for example, a factory or government department that provides comprehensive care for employees, such as accommodation, education, health care and pensions. Informant B1 requested that his case be medically diagnosed since, prior to April 2001, medical texts in China included homosexuality as a form of mental illness, which, by extension, meant that it should not be handled as a criminal form of behaviour. In view of his work unit’s refusal to comply with his request, Informant B1 independently went to a hospital at another work unit and was diagnosed as suffering with a case of same-sex love illness. He subsequently went to three other hospitals in Beijing and was given the same diagnosis. However, it was only in 1980, when the provincial high court overturned the previous verdict on his case that he went back to work. Yet to this day, the wages that were withheld from him during the period when he was accused of committing ‘errors’ have not been returned, and his suspension of Party membership has not been revoked. Informant B1 gave me a document he had received outlining the overturning of the previous internal Party decision on his case. According to this document, ‘X’ was subjected in March 1966 to an internal Party disciplinary warning for committing the mistake of ‘sodomy’. ‘X’ appealed this decision on the grounds that a hospital in Hunan Province had diagnosed him as having a case of ‘same- sex love’ illness. In consequence, the original decision to subject ‘X’ to an internal Party disciplinary warning was repealed. ‘X’ was also sentenced to two years community service by a County People’s Court on the basis of committing the crime of hooliganism, the criminal record of which was later overturned. The document concludes by stating that the confirmed facts of the original decision were not substantial enough to warrant a criminal sanction because ‘X’ had been diagnosed with the ‘same-sex love’ illness. On this basis, both the original Party disciplinary warning and the decision of the County People’s Court were overturned. The experience of Informant B1 enables us to draw three conclusions concerning the handling of male homosexuality in the PRC. First, on the charge of committing sodomy, some homosexuals were charged with the crime of hooliganism during the Maoist era. Second, if a hospital diagnosed a case of same-sex love illness, these criminal charges could be converted to a miscarriage of justice and corrected. Third, exposed homosexual conduct might be subject to Party and administrative sanctions, such as suspension of Party membership and withholding of wages. Although this case cannot be viewed as typical, since the manner in which it was handled would have been influenced by the quality of local legal practice, it nonetheless offers insights into how the issue of male homosexuality has been 86 Li Yinhe handled in the PRC. Indeed, with reference to the specific details of this case, it appears that Informant B1 may have been ultimately treated with some degree of leniency because he adopted a passive rather than active homosexual role, i.e. he did not penetrate the other party, but rather was penetrated. In his own words, ‘when I have sex with a man I take on the female role’. Historically speaking, the act of penetration and being penetrated are implicated with notions of hierarchy and status in China (Chou 2000: 26–7). Thus, as with many other countries, the act of penetrating denotes a higher status whilst being penetrated denotes an inferior or subordinate status (see Altman 2000: 175). The harsh treatment and excessive administration penalties that were meted out to homosexuals during the Cultural Revolution period was a product of the time. As is well known, this was a period in which the rule of law was non-existent and Chinese society was plunged into chaos. Although that era has past, just like the passing of a nightmare, it has nevertheless left a deep scar both in the minds of the people and on social consciousness in general. Certainly, the harsh treatment that was meted out to many homosexuals during this period has had a continued impact on their lives. Moreover, it promoted the existence of homophobia in Chinese society. This problem has yet to be resolved, as the following sections show.

Homosexuals, the police and fear of public exposure Despite the introduction of market reforms and China’s shift to a ‘rule of law’ in 1979, the Chinese police continued to apprehend, search, interrogate, and even detain, people for engaging in consensual homosexual acts throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the absence of any specific laws on homosexuality, persons apprehended for engaging in acts of same-sex love tended to be caught up in general policing campaigns to secure public security and were generally charged with the more generic crime of hooliganism. Policing campaigns have become a common feature of reform-era China ever since the first ‘strike-hard’ campaign against crime was launched in 1983 (Dutton and Lee 1993: 316–36). To the extent that these campaigns target homosexual behaviour, they have tended to focus on the policing of public spaces where male homosexuals are known to congregate, in particular, public parks and public toilet blocks. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that numerous stories circulate among members of the homosexual community concerning the policing of public spaces where male homosexuals are known to congregate. Informant C1 had this to say about his encounter with the police:

I once came across a joint operation run by the Chinese police in conjunction with local neighbourhood groups. They checked my identification card and let me go. I heard that they only arrested those having sex in a public space and petty criminals. If you are not involved in this kind of thing, then the police will usually leave you alone. Regulating male same-sex relationships 87 Informant D1, a homosexual from Tianjin, similarly suggested that the police conducted regular raids on homosexual meeting places, but did not target all homosexuals. As he put it:

Nobody goes to that place now. When people used to go there, the police would often come and detain a lot of people. I was there four or five times when this happened but the police never took me away. They only asked to see my identification card on two occasions. My philosophy is to remain nonchalant. If you are nervous the police will be drawn to you.

Informant E1, however, described how the police detained him for interrogation at a homosexual meeting place, even though he was subsequently released. In his own words:

I ran into the police once. It was past 10 p.m. one summer night. I was out for the evening and went past a homosexual meeting place and popped in for some fun. I was sitting on a stone stool chatting with another person when the police came. There were two officers in uniform and two in plain clothes. They told us to stand up and come along with them. We replied that we were not doing anything [but to no avail]. At the station they interrogated us separately, asking what was the name of the other person, where did they work, and so forth. The police said that they knew why we went to that place. They said that seeing as we were not mentally deranged [i.e. they appeared to be ‘straight’] we would be let off, but we should not give them any trouble in the future. They said: we are all people ... try to have some self-restraint and do not go to that place so often. Then in front of our eyes they tore up the interrogation record. I think that when you get into trouble you should not run or hide, if you do not hang around with obvious homosexuals in public places, then you will be okay.

Other informants related stories that highlight the different tactics used by male homosexuals who meet in public spaces to evade police apprehension. According to Informant F1, during one strike-hard campaign, people were apprehended every day at such places. As he continued, ‘one winter evening, I went to ‘X’ public toilet. I had just entered when an old man came in and had a look around. When I went outside the old man shouted: Stop! He asked me what I was doing .... Fortunately I had previously worked out a plan. I said I was on my way home from work, had just gone in to use the toilet, and so on. I answered all of his questions without hesitation. In the end, he told me not to go there again and let me go’. Apart from personal tactics, male homosexuals who meet in public places also use group tactics to evade apprehension by the Chinese police. As Informant G1 explained: ‘At “X” public toilet, members of the Chinese police and local neighbourhood groups blocked both of the exits and arrested everyone inside. During that period, people were caught every day at “X”, but people still took the 88 Li Yinhe chance and went. A secret understanding emerged. If there were people at it inside someone would go to the door and whistle. When someone approached, they would cough’. Some informants not only expressed their resistance to the policing of homosexual meeting places, but also displayed a strong awareness of their legal rights. Informant H1, for example, related the following story.

One time when I went to ‘X’ I came across the local police and neighbourhood groups apprehending people. My friend went into the toilet while I waited for him outside. They shone a torch in my face and said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said I was waiting for my friend who was in the toilet, and asked, ‘Why shouldn’t I wait here anyway?’ ‘Is it illegal?’ In the end, the police took us to their office for an interrogation. They even went through my friend’s notebook. Their attitude was very heavy handed and rough. However, they had no right to question me because they never produced a shred of paperwork.

In a somewhat different vein, one member of a cross-dressing performance troupe that was disbanded by the Chinese police explained how he tried to oppose this action with reference to Chinese history. Apparently when the police attempted to disband the troupe, Informant I1 cited the example of Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), a renowned Peking Opera performer in the first half of the twentieth century who was famous for playing female roles. Informant I1 asked the police: ‘if Mei Lanfang could reverse roles and play women from ancient China, then why can’t we play modern women?’ The public security officials reputedly responded by saying that it was not appropriate for members of the performance troupe to talk to them of such things. The preceding stories demonstrate that the majority of male homosexuals in China today do not appear to be overly concerned about the possibility of being apprehended by the police and detained for ‘reform through education’ on the grounds of hooliganism. Although the threat of being detained does frighten many homosexuals, those who have been apprehended and interrogated by the Chinese police tend to have a more relaxed attitude. Put simply, they figure that an individual is safe so long as they are not physically caught in the act of engaging in same-sex love; and, since most same-sex acts occur in private, the chances of being ‘caught in the act’ are very small. In other words, they believe that their actions will not come to the attention of policing authorities, unless they are reported by other people, and unless they are caught engaging in acts of same-sex love in public places. To cite Informant J1: ‘some people do it in any old place and the police do not have much option other than taking action’. Nevertheless, many homosexuals in China are afraid that apprehension by the police will result in their conduct being reported to their work unit and, ultimately, their families. Participants in acts of same-sex love registered a very strong reaction to the police practice of sending ‘notification’ to the work unit of detained persons, primarily from fear that their activities would become public knowledge. Regulating male same-sex relationships 89 As Informant K1 explained: ‘I know of one guy whose work unit was notified after he was apprehended. It was not a very big work unit and therefore did not contain many people. Everyone soon knew what had happened. This ruined his life and he became even more reckless. In consequence, I think that even with the intention of setting things right the work unit should not be notified’. Informant L1 added that the threat of public exposure as a person who engages in acts of same-sex love could sometimes result in more serious consequences, such as suicide. In his own words: ‘there was a homosexual in a certain city, 20-odd years old and very good-looking. The police apprehended him and he refused to give them his name. They therefore threatened to contact his work unit and he killed himself’. Male homosexuals with a high social status were particularly afraid of their activities becoming known to their work unit. Informant M1 explained that his lover was not afraid of being apprehended by the police. However, as an army doctor and a Party member, he was extremely worried about his participation in acts of same-sex love becoming known to his work unit. Hence, following his apprehension by the Chinese police, he found a way to have his case file destroyed. In contrast, Informant N1, a homosexual from a lower social background, did not seem overly worried if his work unit was notified of his sexual persuasion. This particular informant had been apprehended by the police for robbery, not for engagement in same-sex conduct. As he said of his arrest and sexual persuasion: ‘if the police notify the work unit, the work unit will treat that information with confidentiality’. He suggested that this information would be treated with confidentiality because the work unit had no evidence to prove that he had engaged in homosexual activities, and therefore could do nothing about it. However, the pervasive fear of public exposure means that participants in acts of same-sex love can become the victims of intimidation and deception. For example, Informant O1 told me of a 30-odd year-old man who liked to intimidate people by pretending to be a plain-clothes police officer. As a result of this intimidation, he was beaten up by a group of people and injured so badly that he could not get out of bed for several months. I also heard a story of a homosexual who was a member of a neighbourhood policing team. He apparently stalked homosexuals by following them home. He would then verify their identity at the local residential committee office and try to ‘befriend’ them. Informants P1 and Q1 similarly suggested that male homosexuals are subject to various acts of deception on the part of people purporting to be members of local policing teams. In the words of Informant P1: ‘one time I met a guy who was pretending to be a member of a neighbourhood policing team. He kept chatting me up but I wasn’t interested and eventually got rid of him’. A middle-aged informant also described how he responded to an approach by a younger man claiming to be a plain-clothes policeman. To use his own words: ‘I said I was too’. It ended up that he was not a plain-clothes policeman at all. As I said to him after, ‘I am not afraid of the police, because if you take me to the police station, you will be in trouble for flirting with me too’ (Informant Q1). 90 Li Yinhe Despite the existence of such practices, the majority of people I interviewed agreed that it was not difficult to identify plain-clothes police officers. To cite Informant R1: ‘plain-clothes police officers stare at you in a really unreasonable manner. Their eyes are full of disdain and severity, their whole attitude is severe and serious’. But there are also some participants in acts of same-sex love who cannot recognize plain-clothes police officers and are subsequently apprehended. Occasionally, plain-clothes police officers will pretend to be homosexuals in order to entrap them. Informant S1 told me about his friend’s experience of such deception. As he explained: ‘I told my friend not to go out but he would not listen to me. As a result, the first person he “hooked” was a plain-clothes police officer. That guy said he would take him home but instead took him straight to the police station’. Stories also circulate within the male homosexual community regarding the brutality that they often experience as a result of their marginalized position. For example, there is a saying amongst members of the homosexual community that the Chinese police do not beat people, but members of the local neighbourhood policing teams do. According to Informant T1:

They really cracked down last month. In the public toilet block at ‘X’ Park, members of the local neighbourhood policing teams ordered everyone to stand in a line against the wall and take off their shoes. They then beat them with an electric baton. Usually after members of the local neighbourhood policing teams have beaten you they let you go. They just try to beat fear into you. When some members of the local policing teams are doing night-shift and have nothing to do they find someone to beat up just for kicks.

Other stories circulate about the ludicrous manner in which members of the local neighbourhood policing teams attempt to recognize male homosexuals. According to one joke, they ask to see their fingertips and if the suspected homosexual puts out their hands with palms facing down, then they conclude that they are not homosexual, they are normal. But, if they present their hands with the palm facing up, and fingers curled inward (like women supposedly do) then they are homosexual. After this, they also ask to see the bottom of the suspected homosexual’s shoes. If the ‘suspect’puts their foot forward, then they are normal. But if they curl their leg backwards and turn their head to look at the bottom of their foot, then they are homosexual. If there is any truth in such stories, they simply highlight the general naivety of the public when it comes to identifying homosexuals. Having said this, there are also stories of horrific beatings and deliberate acts of intimidation on the part of the Chinese police and local neighbourhood policing teams. For example, Informant U1 said: ‘When they apprehend people in ‘X’, they break their rib bones’. Informant V1 recounted a similar story of intimidation. As he explained: ‘I came across a guy who told me of his experiences after been detained by the Chinese police. The police apparently called him a “rabbit” Regulating male same-sex relationships 91 (tuzi), which is a term that was sometimes used in traditional China to denote same-sex love. They then asked if he had had sexual intercourse with another man. He said he had not’. As the informant proceeded to explain, however, it did not matter whether the man admitted that he was a homosexual or not. If he had said that he had engaged in homosexual intercourse, they would have charged him with hooliganism. If he denied it, they would have beaten him with an electric baton (Informant V1). Another friend told him that he was walking in the park one night at 12.30 a.m. with a friend when the police apprehended him. He was detained for 15 days during which time he was beaten with an electric baton. They also fined him more than 100 yuan (Informant V1). Due to fears of public exposure, the rules of the homosexual community do not permit those who have been detained by the police to identify other members of the homosexual community. People who do so can evoke serious animosity towards themselves. As Informant W1 explained: ‘people in the homosexual community often come to blows and fight for the affections of others. But whatever happens you do not betray each other, for fear of retribution, either by others or fate ...’. Another homosexual related his own experience of being betrayed and subsequently detained by the police. In his own words:

One day, a guy who I had met in ‘X’ Park was apprehended by the police. He confessed to the police and told them of my identity. The police later came to my home and took me away. When we got to the local police station, they asked me to reveal all that I had done. They kept exhorting me to tell. However, they did not beat me. In the end, a member of my family asked one of their connections to intervene on my behalf and to secure my release. Altogether I was detained for ten days. It seems to me that the police did not put this incident into my personal file because people at my work unit do not appear to know anything about it. Years later, when I travelled abroad, I also did not encounter any problems obtaining a passport, which would have been a problem if I had a police record (Informant X1).

Despite the seeming leniency of this latter case, Informant Y1, a homosexual from a city in northeast China, recalls that he still feels scared even today when he remembers how the police humiliated him. As he put it:

I kept my sexual persuasion a complete secret from family. Even so, it is hard to keep your identity as a homosexual secret, because other people, including members of the policing and legal establishment, can discover you. In order to avoid future trouble, we will do whatever we can in pleading with such persons not to disclose our secret to family members. My greatest fear was that my family would find out. Sometimes you have to suffer humiliation in order to avoid this. For example, I was discovered by a policeman one day in a park. After he had asked to see my identity cards, he told me to come to the criminal section of the Public Security office the following morning. He said 92 Li Yinhe that if I did not show up then he would notify my work unit and family and detain me as a further punishment. I was so frightened that I broke out into a sweat. The next day I reluctantly went to receive the ‘education’ that would be offered to me at the police station. When I got there it was as if I was the object of a peep show. Ten or more officers took turns interrogating me. They asked me such detailed questions; I was too embarrassed to answer. Some asked me to demonstrate exactly what homosexuals do ... at that moment my perspiration became mixed with tears. I begged them for mercy and to let me go. When I came out, I felt sick. Feelings of shame, self-blame and remorse ran through my entire body. But the thing I feared most never happened. After a period of waiting on tenterhooks, it appeared that the police had not notified my family and work unit, so the humiliation was worth it in the end (Informant Y1).

This example reveals the severe consequences attributable to the ambiguous legal status of same-sex love in China today. The ambiguous legal status of same- sex love leaves homosexuals in the dark in relation to the possible consequences of their actions and the punishments they might attract. In doing so, it not only empowers the police to interrogate and frighten members of the homosexual community in an arbitrary fashion, but also enables members of the police who possess an aberrant personality to intrude into the private lives of individuals. What is more, it destroys the consciousness that homosexuals possess of their legitimate rights as individuals. Certainly, it is disconcerting to discover that many homosexuals in China are prepared to consider such humiliation worthwhile so long as the police do not disclose their sexual persuasion to their work unit and families.

The arbitrary nature of administrative sanctions As mentioned previously, the most serious threat to homosexual conduct between consenting adults in present-day China does not come from legal sanctions or police arrest in the name of public security, but rather from administrative and Party sanctions. This is a method of control peculiar to China. Although homosexual activities are subject to legal sanctions in some Western countries, for example, some states in the USA, actual cases of prosecution are rare. In those states of the USA where same-sex love is legal, homosexual activities are not subject to legal restrictions, in particular, they are not normally subject to sanctions imposed by governmental authorities or employers. At the most, they might face discrimination in terms of gaining employment, something which has led homosexuals in the USA to demand the right to equal opportunity in employment. In China, by way of contrast, administrative sanctions have become the primary threat facing male homosexuals. Administrative sanctions directed at homosexuals in China have no solid legal foundation. This means that individual work units can determine for themselves how to deal with cases that are brought to their attention. Some work units do not take any action against members of the Regulating male same-sex relationships 93 homosexual community, whilst others withhold wages or lower wage scales. Some work units record instances of homosexuality as a demerit on a given individual’s work file, which may adversely influence decisions in relation to that individual’s future chances of promotion, housing allocation, bonuses, and so on. Other work units place the individual on probation and yet others transfer them to a different position within the work unit or even dismiss them from the work unit for a period. In some cases, the person(s) concerned will be expelled from the Party, Armed Services or civil service. One case that came to my attention involved a manager of a state-owned factory who, due to his engagement in same-sex activities, was demoted to the status of an ordinary worker. Because of his competence, he was gradually promoted to workshop director, then deputy factory head and finally returned to his original post. Later on, his sexual persuasion was revealed once again. This happened during a campaign to consolidate Party discipline and his history was reported by his peers to Party leaders. He was subsequently expelled from the Party and dismissed from his employment at the factory. The arbitrary nature of such sanctions can be further illustrated with reference to a letter that was published in the unregistered newsletter, Aizhi jianbao [Lover’s Bulletin] in 1997. This letter warrants lengthy citation because it highlights the personal tragedies that can ensue from the arbitrary imposition of administrative sanctions. As the author of this letter explained, he used to have a young friend who was good looking, cheerful and lively. This friend taught Chinese and history in high school. Whenever he gave a class, the words on the textbook page came to life with intense feeling and vividness. The classroom was brimming with energy and excitement. He became not only the most favoured teacher among the students, but also a recognized talent among the teachers themselves. Unfortunately a same-sex liaison that he had had with an old schoolmate was exposed. The wife of the schoolmate stirred up a tremendous fuss. Within the space of one evening he was suddenly treated as if he were a completely different person. He was sent to an ordinary combined primary and middle school way out in the suburbs to do administrative work. He was put in charge of the daily living requirements of teachers and students, including ringing the school bell and stoking the boiler. The author of the letter in Aizhi jianbao thus concluded that his friend had been subjected to nothing other than a disguised case of ‘reform through education and/or labour’. As the author of the letter in Aizhi jianbao continued, he took advantage of a work-related opportunity to go and visit his friend, who he found to be suffering from acute depression. In his own words:

I found him sitting on a stool in the intense heat of the boiler room. On another stool he had a glass of strong liquor and a half-eaten salty duck egg. That young man brimming with talent was no longer to be seen. That extroverted and handsome young guy was no more. His hair and beard were unkempt. His entire appearance was dirty and dishevelled. When I used the formulaic expressions that are the most sincere and, at the same time, 94 Li Yinhe insincere, and encouraged him to ‘get yourself back on your feet’ and ‘pull yourself together, don’t let yourself fall into decline’, he just smiled at me. His smile gave me a sense of dread because I could not discern if it stemmed from agonized helplessness or was haughty ridicule directed at me. He just kept smiling and said: ‘you needn’t bother. My former behaviour had the sole objective of hiding my ‘hooligan nature’ (Aizhi jianbao 1997).

Although the punishment that this particular individual received, an internal transfer within the work unit, is a long way from the harshness of detention for reform through education and/or labour, the harm that was done to both the individual concerned and conceptions of social justice is not to be treated lightly. The punishment was excessive and therefore unjust. This man’s actions did not harm anyone and should not have been treated as something that warranted punishment. In consequence, the imposition of even the lightest administrative penalty for a same-sex act between two consenting adults involves a great miscarriage of justice and causes tremendous harm to society. The experience of Informant Z1, an elderly homosexual, almost 80 years old, underscores the restrictions and oppression that male homosexuals in China face from administrative sanctions. As he explained:

My real life did not begin until I was 60 years old. When I was working I did not dare take part in same-sex activities. It was only after I retired that I gained some freedom. The greatest pleasure that I have found in this life has come from the sexual pleasure I experienced after I turned sixty (Informant Z1).

This man’s experience highlights not only the extent to which homosexuals in China fear administrative punishments and social condemnation, but also illustrates how such sanctions function to oppress human nature and desire. In sum, the lack of specific laws or regulations relating to homosexuality in China has not resulted in freedom for homosexuals; instead, it has encouraged the imposition of arbitrary administrative penalties for engagement in consensual acts of same-sex love. The lack of specific laws or regulations means that legal bodies, administrative work units and state-owned enterprises can continue to handle instances of same-sex love in various ways. Concomitantly, it leaves members of the homosexual community unclear as to the possible consequences of their actions. From the perspective of Western standards, therefore, the continued use of administrative sanctions denies homosexuals equality before the law, including the right to equal employment and opportunities for promotion. Hence the next section of this chapter looks at the issue of how male homosexuals in China view both their position and the subject of homosexual rights.

Homosexual identity and homosexual rights During the course of my previous research (Li Yinhe 1998a), I asked male homosexuals in China to complete a questionnaire, which asked how they viewed their Regulating male same-sex relationships 95 personal conduct. Did they feel their conduct was ‘risky’, ‘safe’, or did they feel ‘unsure’? The results suggested that most respondents did not feel very secure. The majority felt that their behaviour was ‘risky’ and only a minority thought there was ‘no risk’. When asked to detail what kinds of consequences might follow from being exposed as participants in same-sex love, most respondents simply stated that they did not know, although other respondents who considered the question more thoroughly suggested that possible consequences might include administration sanctions, and perhaps even ‘reform through education’, rather than a ‘criminal conviction and imprisonment’ (ibid.). It is thus evident that most homosexuals in China exist in a state of uncertainty regarding the legal status of their conduct. Male homosexuals generally hold two different views on the current ambiguous status of same-sex love in Chinese law: those who adhere to a conservative position accept the status quo; and, those who promote a radical position, reject it. Those who accept the status quo maintain that there will never be a specific campaign against same-sex love in China. In their view, campaign-related arrests are all associated with the question of public security. As they argue, the main difficulties faced by members of the homosexual community in China are the traditional pressure to get married, and the lack of publicly available information on homosexuality. For proponents of this view, the benefit of having no specific legislation on same-sex love is that there is room for individuals to work the system. Those who adhere to a conservative position frequently compare the legal status of same-sex love in China with that in the West and claim that the Chinese instance is less stringent. As they argue, China is more relaxed on the issue of homosexuality than many foreign countries. According to Informant A2, for example, ‘Chinese law is less stringent and doesn’t bother us. Apart from the possibility of being arrested in an anti-crime campaign, nobody bothers us. I feel that China is very lenient when it comes to same-sex love, so long as one does not get involved in male prostitution or criminal activities then there should not be a problem’. This conservative position can be further highlighted with reference to the comments of Informant B2, an elderly homosexual who forwarded the theory of the three don’ts: ‘don’t marry’, ‘don’t resent being a homosexual’, and ‘don’t expose yourself to others’. Informant B2 described the principle of ‘don’t resent’ as follows.

Although the situation of homosexuals in China is not ideal, there is nonetheless a world of difference between how we are treated, compared with the cruel treatment homosexuals experienced in Europe during the Middle Ages and in fascist Germany. Homosexuals, as is the case with ethnic minorities and people of colour, will get fairer treatment eventually. In keeping with the popularization of sexology and improved education, homosexuals will no longer need to blame genetic inheritance or the environment. They will be at liberty to make decisions about their own life and to ensure their happiness. 96 Li Yinhe There are neo-Nazis who harass Jews and other minorities in Europe, the KKK is still active in harassing blacks in the USA, and there are those still hostile to homosexuals. Everywhere you look there are petty people who are intolerant to those who are different. Homosexuals should not have unrealis- tic expectations about achieving a relaxed and tolerant social atmosphere for same-sex love in China in a short period of time. Homosexuals are not interested in provoking trouble, mounting general opposition or coming out. They will be satisfied if society allows them to explore their own sexual preferences (Informant B2).

People who adhere to a conservative position tend to advocate toleration rather than the promotion of homosexual rights. For instance, Informant C2 stated: ‘I want to argue for the rightness of homosexual conduct. We know that contemporary Chinese morality does not condone same-sex love, and we do not expect to imitate the situation in Western countries, which gives homosexuals’ social recognition and a legitimate status. However, we would be grateful if people, culture and society, could be slightly more tolerant’. Informant D2, a young homosexual, similarly argued for toleration and questioned the feasibility of demanding homosexual rights in the near future. As he explained:

I don’t want to come out or make my sexual persuasion public knowledge. I heard that some people held a same-sex party. It seems to me more like promoting homosexual sex than asking the public to understand same-sex love. This is going too far. It exceeds the boundaries of government tolerance. I think that achieving homosexual rights is a gradual process. It will take us at least another half a century to realize the same degree of legitimation that homosexuals have in Hong Kong.

Many homosexuals in China believe that a radical stance on homosexual rights will prove ineffective, since the major problems they face have less do with the absence of legal recognition, and more to do with the intolerant and misinformed attitudes present in society itself. Informant E2, for instance, stated:

The main difficulty homosexuals in China face is not that people will accuse you of engaging in criminal behaviour, but rather that some people will despise you in their hearts for being unclean, abnormal, immoral, or even for being a repulsive social phenomenon. The effects of social discrimination are much more powerful than that of the law. Same-sex love is neither a crime nor an immoral act: it is neither a disease nor a psychological abnormality. It is simply the lifestyle of a group of people. On the premise that homosexuality causes no harm to public security or the lives of others, we hope that society will become more accepting and allow us to lead our lives in the way we wish. Regulating male same-sex relationships 97 Thus those who hold a conservative opinion generally limit their calls to greater social tolerance and understanding, rather than pushing for homosexual rights. Indeed, Informant F2, a homosexual with a rather high level of education, startled me by saying: ‘at present it is not a question of how society can help us, but instead how we can help society’. He explained this statement as follows:

Why does society misunderstand us? They have absolutely no idea what we are about and are therefore completely blind in their criticism. Homosexuals should raise their sense of self-esteem (xinli suzhi) and overcome their inferiority complex. Most people like to eat things that are fragrant and sweet, but some people prefer food that is bitter and offensive to the nose. We should not force the latter group to change just because they are different. They have not done anything wrong and should be allowed to eat whatever they desire (Informant F2).3

In short, he implied that homosexuals should assist people in understanding them. Informant G2, another homosexual with a high level of education, similarly advocated the need for more social tolerance and understanding of homosexuality, rather than pushing for the introduction of homosexual rights. To use his own words:

Talk of ‘rights’ implies the demand to be treated like everyone else. This ‘like everyone else’ basically means in terms of the same right to good fortune and happiness; but happiness is completely determined by the individual. I believe that even without equal rights many comrades [homosexuals] lead happy lives that are conducted in a successful and courageous manner, whereas many ‘straight’ people clamour for divorce and not all of them are happy. Truly, whether or not one is happy comes back to the individual (Informant G2).

Conversely, those who take a radical stance with regard to the promotion of homosexual rights in China are highly critical of the arbitrary and discriminatory treatment that many homosexuals receive. In the words of Informant H2:

The legal status of same-sex love in China is ambiguous. There is no specific terminology defining same-sex love as illegal. This situation makes me think of China’s news inspection system: there is no form of inspection other than the persons sent by the Party Propaganda Department to inspect the Party’s daily papers. But it does not matter because everyone knows what can and cannot be published anyway. We can similarly imagine that there will never be any laws against homosexuality in China, but everybody knows how it will be dealt with nonetheless. People in the policing and legal departments also know and do their jobs accordingly. The problem is that this situation discriminates against ordinary people who are homosexual. If they are accused of being a ‘hooligan’, what can they say or do in their defence? 98 Li Yinhe Homosexuals who advance a radical position on homosexual rights tend to be relatively young, with high levels of education and a strong consciousness of their civil rights. They hope that China will establish a law that protects the rights of homosexuals. They also hope that China will set up a homosexual association both to protect homosexual rights and to regulate certain homosexual behaviours, such as those relating to underage sex, male prostitution and safe sex practices. For example, Informant I2 stated that he hopes governmental authorities in China will eventually establish formal laws protecting same-sex love. While admitting that such a move might be difficult for members of the general public to accept, he thought that they would not object too much, because it would not be an issue that affects them directly. As he continued:

Same-sex love can be completely protected and restrained by the law. This is similar to the case of marriage when it evolved from a communal state to polygamy and finally to monogamy.4 A great deal of same-sex love at present is also in a state of chaos (hunluan zhuangtai) [like marriage was in its primitive communal state]. Many gays have several partners. It’s incestuous! (luanlun). Thus a law could determine that a gay can only have one gay partner at a time. Same-sex love does not cause any social harm: it simply requires that society regulate, restrain and adjust same-sex love so that it can be like opposite-sex love. Establishing some kind of homosexual association could function as a method of combating HIV/AIDS. It would encourage people to establish more responsible relationships. A social association might also help ameliorate some sexual tensions. In comparison to the West, a monogamous relationship is more suited to the current values of contemporary Chinese people, which means avoiding free sex (xingluan).5 By the way, although I am not personally interested in free sex, I do believe that people have the right to do as they please, providing it causes themselves and other people no harm (Informant I2).

Informant J2 similarly expressed hope that, in keeping with the laws of historical development, homosexuality ultimately would gain acceptance both in China and in the world more generally. As he put it: ‘I hope that people will gradually come to understand us. I believe that with the advance of civilization and social progress, same-sex love will become acceptable both in China and worldwide, and in the eyes of the law. It is simply a matter of time’. Adding to this, Informant J2 argued that collective organization on issues of homosexual rights is an essential precursor to overcoming mainstream social prejudice. In his own words:

I am a gay. First, I do not believe that my preferences are in any way, shape or form improper. I firmly believe that gayness is an aspect of human nature. I’ve never for a moment considered that my preferences should be corrected. Second, I’m not happy. I feel an enormous amount of pressure. I feel the Regulating male same-sex relationships 99 sense of shame that other people are forcing on me. It has driven me to the point of nervous collapse. I feel exceptionally indignant about the injustice society dishes out to us. Finally, I’m very interested in what is known as the gay liberation movement in foreign countries, especially in the USA. I pay particular attention to reports and articles in the media on this. I believe that getting organized and forming a gay association, uniting individual strength into a collective cause, and actively engaging in political life, is the only way to change the unjust treatment society metes out to us’ (Informant J2).

Informant K2 also saw the political organization of homosexuals as essential for raising public awareness of homosexuality and promoting homosexual rights. As he explained, ‘this is a gradual process of awakening’. ‘To be honest’, he continued, ‘democracy and accountability are much better than hiding in the closet. In the 1980s when people first came to know of the term “same-sex love” most of them did not understand what it meant and simply felt it was very myste- rious and abnormal. Now people do not feel that this is the case and are slowly beginning to understand and get used to the idea. I think this is a lot better than being seen as a monster. I hope such progress continues’ (Informant K2). Last, but not least, Informant L2, a homosexual who had studied overseas, insisted that it is time to introduce positive political change with regard to the promotion of homosexual rights in China. Talking of his experiences overseas, Informant L2 explained that he had come across the English-language term ‘homophobia’. This term, he noted, has been discussed at length in Western countries, ever since the Stonewall Riots on 27 June 1969 in New York City ushered in the gay liberation movement. While previously unaware of the existence of homophobia, Informant L2 said that he now saw that it permeated all of the print and broadcast media. As he concluded, ‘I do not know how the English-language term “homophobia” should be translated into Chinese. But it seems to me that China is 100 per cent homophobic. It is time to make some changes’ (Informant L2). This a sentiment with which I concur.

Conclusion Male homosexuals in China today do not face severe attacks and hatred, as is the case, to some extent, for homosexuals in the West. The problems they face stem from the misunderstanding and prejudice of mainstream society. In some ways, being subject to misunderstanding and prejudice is better than being hated, as are homosexuals in some other countries. Nonetheless, the current situation in China makes homosexuals uneasy and expect little more than the ability to survive. They do not dare to instigate an intense campaign for the promotion of homosexual rights. This philosophy of keeping to the ‘golden mean’ has deep roots in the tradition and psyche of the Chinese people. It therefore seems that the current status quo with regard to the situation of homosexuals in China will persist for some time yet. It will persist at least until the homosexual rights movement in the West makes further advances, such as gaining legal recognition, the right to 100 Li Yinhe same-sex marriage, and the right to equal opportunity in employment. It will also persist until an increasing number of people throughout the world change their attitude towards same-sex love. Despite recent improvements in Chinese law, homosexuals in the PRC will not be able to achieve higher levels of social acceptance and better treatment until these changes are realized.

Notes 1 The Chinese term for homosexuality, tongxinglian (literally same-sex love), is generally understood as referring to male homosexuality. Historically speaking, literature concerning the homosexual tradition in China ‘was almost always written by men for men, very little documentation survives on lesbian life’ (Hinsch 1992: 7); and, recent efforts to study female as well as male homosexuality in the PRC have been limited by the general reluctance of lesbians to talk about their experiences publicly. I have conducted a small number of interviews with women who have had same-sex experiences in Li Yinhe (1998b). However, due to the limited nature of research on lesbians in China to date, this chapter focuses on the subject of male homosexuality. 2 The Chinese term, ‘jijianzui’, literally means the ‘crime of chicken sodomy’. According to Chou Wah-shan (2000), this was the first term to appear in Chinese history that was derogatory of same-sex love. It refers to the belief that domestic fowls engage in same- sex acts. It is disparaging rather than hostile insofar as it does not contain the religious notions of guilt and shame implied in Western conceptions of ‘sodomy’ as some kind of ‘sin against nature’. 3 For an English-language discussion of the concept of suzhi (quality) in relation to homosexuality in China, see Lisa Rofel (1999: 451–74). 4 This notion of marital evolution from promiscuous communal sex to the monogamous heterosexual conjugal unit was developed in Marxist and anthropological writing, notably that of Frederick Engels and Henry Morgan, during the nineteenth century (see Engels 1972 [1884]). It continues to have currency in Chinese Marxist orthodoxy in the present period (see Gary Sigley 2001: 118–53). 5 ‘Free sex’ here refers to either multiple partners in succession or group sex. A precise translation from the Chinese would be ‘sexual chaos’, where ‘luan’ means ‘without order’. The informant is expressing this in a negative sense insofar as sexual promiscuity is held to contribute to social instability.

References Aizhi jianbao [Lover’s Bulletin] (1997) Issue 9. Altman, D. (2000) ‘Talking sex’, Postcolonial Studies, 3, 2: 171–8. Cai Yi (2000) ‘Guanyu Zhongguo tongxinglian wenti de lifa sikao’ [A consideration of laws on homosexuality in China], Qingshaonian fanzui wenti, Issue 6. Chou Wah-shan (2000) Tongzhi: Politics of Same-sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies, New York: The Haworth Press. Dutton, M. (1998) Streetlife China, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Dutton, M. and Lee, T. (1993) ‘Missing the target? Policing strategies in the period of economic reform’, Crime and Delinquency, 39: 316–36. Engels, F. (1972 [1884]) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, USA: International Publishers. Gao Feng (2003) ‘Zhongguo tongxinglian quan jilu’ [A complete record of homosexuality in China], http://heritage.news.tom.com/Archive/2001/7/30-53958.html (accessed 18 December 2004). Regulating male same-sex relationships 101 Gong Guojiang (2003) ‘Jiaqiang woguo de tongxinglian fazhi jianshe’ [Strengthen China’s legal system in relation to homosexuality], http://www.chinaorg/shownews.asp?news_ id+335 (accessed 18 December 2003). Hinsch, B. (1992) Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, Berkeley, Los Angeles; Oxford: University of California Press. Li Yinhe (1998a) Tongxinglian yawenhua [Homosexual subculture], Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo: chubanshe. Li Yinhe (1998b) Zhongguo nüxing de ganqing yu xing [Love and Sexuality of Chinese Women], Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe. Li Yinhe and Wang Xiaobo (1992) Tamen de shijie: Zhongguo nan tongxinglian qunluo toushi [Their World: A Perspective on China’s Male Homosexual Community], Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe. Rofel, L. (1999) ‘Qualities of desire: imagining gay identities in China’, GLQ, 5, 4: 451-74. Sigley, G. (2001) ‘Keep it in the family: government, marriage, and sex in contemporary China’, in M. Jolly and K. Ram (eds) Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility, and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 118–53. Yin Xiangrong (2002) ‘Xianzai za haiyou liumangzui’ [How come the crime of hooliganism still exists in present-day China?], http://news.rednet.com.cn/Articles/2002/12/380309.htm (accessed 30 January 2004). 5 Sexual citizenship and the politics of sexual story-telling among Chinese youth

James Farrer

Introduction Shanghai Baby, a sexually explicit narrative of a young Shanghai woman’s multiple love affairs, was the most widely discussed Chinese novel of the late 1990s, providing a momentary focus for people talking about changing sexual standards among Chinese youth (see Wei Hui 1999). Though banned as pornographic by the Chinese authorities and laden with literary clichés and ethnic stereotypes, Shanghai Baby also has its defenders. One of them is Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the US House. In a reader review on the commercial Amazon.com website, Gingrich (2002) writes: ‘If there is even one-tenth as much artistic and personal freedom among the youth in Beijing and Shanghai as this book portrays ... then China has already decentralized and loosened the power of the secret police to a degree unthinkable in the Soviet Union at any point before its final three years’. The conservative congressman’s praise for a novel that celebrates bisexuality and premarital sex may seem puzzling, but it also opens up important questions about the politics of sexual story-telling and claims to sexual citizenship. In Gingrich’s review, Wei Hui’s novel of sexual awakening becomes a story of individuals claiming their ‘natural’ rights to be free from an oppressive state. Concluding that the female protagonist of Shanghai Baby ‘acts outside traditional patterns yet with a remarkably traditional sense of what moves women’ (meaning the search for romantic love), Gingrich (2002) implies that the public sexual culture emerging in China is not simply an amoral consumer hedonism as some mainland Chinese critics have charged – often pointing to books like Shanghai Baby (e.g. Wang Xiaoying 2002). Instead, Gingrich’s account illustrates how liberal claims to individual rights often incorporate appeals to individual moral self-restraint, implicitly drawing boundaries between what are considered to be ‘good’ and ‘bad’ claims. The general question I want to pose, therefore, is: ‘How can we best understand the issue of sexual citizenship for youth in reform era China?’ Sociologist Kenneth Plummer (1995, 1996) describes ‘intimate citizenship’ as a cluster of rights and responsibilities that have emerged in the twentieth century around issues of sexual partner choices, control over the body, reproductive rights, Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 103 intimate bonds and sexual identities. In this chapter, I use the term ‘sexual citizenship’ to refer to the same types of claims, focusing more narrowly on the issue of sexual rights claimed by and for Chinese youth. In particular, I examine how heterosexual Chinese youth have pursued the rights to engage in sexual relations before marriage and the emergence over the past twenty years of public spaces within which youth can discuss and decide their own sexual values. Citizenship is a concept central to Western political theory and I will not try to replace it with a term from Chinese political discourse. Rather, this chapter unapologetically questions Chinese social realities through a Western discourse of citizenship, while also acknowledging the problems associated with this discourse and searching for a more ethnographic definition in everyday practices. Although the Western discourse of citizenship conveys multiple and contradictory meanings, there are two main strands of thought – a liberal individualistic tradition and a civic or collective action tradition (Benier 1995). The liberal tradition of citizenship, originating with Hobbes and Locke, focuses on individual rights and the performance of governments in securing these rights. A liberal model of sexual citizenship in China would describe how free individuals pursue their natural passions and desires subject to the restraints of a public order enforced by the Chinese state. This view is implicit in both criticisms and justifications of Chinese state policies. For instance, much sex education literature published in China has focused on sexuality as a ‘natural’ form of human expression that should not be repressed, but should be contained within a legal, social and moral order that limits sex to appropriate heterosexual partners (Jiang et al. 1988; Lin 1988; Shen 2000). In the Western tradition, the civic discourse of citizenship focuses on the role of citizens in the creation of the norms that govern them through participation in public debates (Benier 1995). This model of citizenship is most clearly associated with Habermas’ ideal of the public sphere, but has its basis in Aristotle’s conception of the citizen as one who is ruled but also rules, by participating in making the rules that she or he must abide by. Citizenship understood in this sense is achieved membership in a self-determining ethical community. As Plummer (1995: 150) argues: ‘Rights and responsibilities are not “natural” or “inalienable” but have to be invented through human activities, and built into the notions of communities, citizenship and identities. Rights and responsibilities depend upon a community of stories which make those same rights plausible and possible’. According to Plummer (1995, 1996), shared stories allow for collective social action and community building by justifying certain conception of ‘rights’. Although organized collective action is difficult in China, loose communities of discourse have emerged around prominent stories shared through the internet and other media. The debate surrounding Shanghai Baby (Wei Hui 1999) in China is indicative of this model of public sexual story-telling, as are the popular collections of personal sexual stories by An Dun (1999) and Wang Ruoxi (2003). Sociologist Li Yinhe’s interviews and columns on popular internet sites are another important contribution to a civic model of sexual citizenship in China. For instance, in an interview on Eastday.com about the controversial internet columnist Mu Zimei 104 James Farrer (discussed below), Li defends women’s rights to sexual autonomy and to free artistic expression about sex (Zeng 2003). Yet Western discussions of ‘sexual citizenship’ also point out the limitations of liberal conceptions of sexual rights and emancipatory sexual politics. The most significant critique of liberal sexual discourse comes from Michel Foucault (1978: 17–49). For Foucault, the sexual citizen, or, more precisely, the sexual subject, is a product of modern strategies of power. Techniques such as self-help and talking therapy produce liberal sexual subjects who not only actively articulate their sexual needs and rights, but also subject them to modern techniques of power and regulation. Kathleen Erwin’s research on Chinese state-sponsored telephone hotlines similarly suggests that public sexual talk in contemporary China is partly an effect of state power rather than a category outside of and opposed to state power (Erwin 2000: 169–70). Likewise, Gail Hershatter (1996: 42–93) argues that the sexual discourses proliferating in contemporary China are closely intertwined with the various modernizing projects of national leaders, scientific sex experts and reformist writers and intellectuals: they should not be taken simply as a sign of a ‘liberation’ of sexuality. We should be careful, however, not to overextend Foucault’s critique of the Western liberal discourse of sexual rights, particularly in relation to an examination of the Chinese case. As Plummer (1996: 37–8) argues, not all sexual stories have been told or are equally easy to tell. This is certainly true of contemporary China, where many sexual stories are being told for the first time, in novel ways and by novel narrators. Sexual story-telling is a much broader social process than Foucault implies, one in which a multitude of narrators and audiences are active participants. Some stories empower their narrators, while others reduce the choices of both narrators and listeners. Consequently, we should not overem- phasize the influence of official discourses and self-appointed experts in determining the contents of sexual culture in China. Rather, we should acknowledge that individuals and small collectivities, working within state-controlled spaces, often appropriate official discourses and even use state-owned resources to make claims for rights and recognition that are not determined solely by state policies or strategies. In present-day China, these processes of sexual story-telling are all occurring within a burgeoning market economy in which some stories sell much better than others. Geremie Barmé (1994: 270–5) argues that the new market economy in China has transformed dissident voices into ‘soft porn and packaged dissent’, a process of commodification in which true critical discourse is stifled. Responding to Barmé, Michael Dutton (1998: 6) points out that the mere fact of commodification does not render resistance or dissent ineffectual, rather the ‘commodity process exhibits an almost uncanny productivity’. Instead of simply lamenting commodification, therefore, we must understand how the institutions of the market both enable and limit participation in public discussions of sexuality. The aim of this chapter is to explain how Chinese youth use sexual stories to claim sexual rights in various private and public contexts. To do so, I present ethnographic evidence from qualitative sociological research on Chinese youth Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 105 sexual culture to show how Western conceptions of citizenship can illuminate – but sometimes mislead us about – the claims for sexual rights made by and for youth in China.1 I first discuss official adolescent sex education in China, and the application of sexual discipline in schools, describing the type of sexual citizen the state is attempting to form and the sites of resistance this creates. I then continue with a discussion of debates in the media in which youth are able to participate in defining sexual norms and identities, again looking at the participation of state-sponsored actors in these debates. Finally, I conclude with an example of the commercialization of sexual story-telling, and the influence of the market on the public sphere of intimate matters and sexual citizenship in contemporary China.

Adolescent education in reform era China Other than the family, the central social institution that Chinese youth confront during adolescence is the education system. Even now Chinese schools continue to police youth sexuality in ways that would seem intrusive and strict to Western youth, prohibiting dating among high-schools students, calling in parents for consultations about students’ dating behaviour and expelling university students who engage in sexual intercourse. From the early 1980s until the present-day, therefore, the Chinese state has attempted to control youth sexuality through prohibitive rules and threats of expulsion from schools. Reacting to perceived laxity in sexual norms among youth in the post-Cultural Revolution era, the Chinese state of the early 1980s recognized the need for explicit ‘adolescent education’ (Evans 1997: 36). In addition to discussions of the physiology of reproduction, the centrepiece of adolescent education has been sexual morality, including educating youth about the dangers of premarital sex (Lin 1988: 4–6; Shen 2002: 185–227; Yao and Yang 1994: 64). Adolescent education in China affirms male–female equality, but at the same time advocates adherence to traditional feminine and masculine gender roles, basing these roles on presumed scientific findings about gender, such as the idea that boys are better at abstract reasoning while girls think more concretely, and that boys are more assertive and girls more passive (Jiang et al. 1988: 20–1; Lin 1988: 91–3). As part of adolescent education in China, boys are enjoined to understand, respect and take care of girls, while girls should learn to be outspoken but proper, and keep an appropriate distance from boys. For example, the ‘Adolescence Education Guidelines’, published by a committee of educators and sex experts, delineates the following four rules for promoting ‘civilized sexual morality and behaviour’ between male and female students: (1) male and female students should not sit too close to one another; (2) male and female students should not make inappropriate jokes; (3) male and female students should not engage in indecent conversations; and (4) male and female students should not push, taunt and tease one another (Jiang et al. 1988: 26). Such rules are aimed at preserving order in the classroom and preventing dating among students. But the most peculiar emphasis of Chinese adolescent education is what is referred to as the problem of ‘premature love’ (zaolian(ai)). Although Chinese 106 James Farrer education authorities have long advocated mixed-gender education, they have also insisted that serious study is incompatible with romance and dating. According to Harriet Evans (1997: 75), ‘premature love’ is a peculiar post-Mao term for dating during adolescence, when a burgeoning interest in sexuality and romance presumably has outstripped emotional, physical and social maturity. One academic treatise on adolescent education gives age 20, ‘plus or minus 2 years’ as the ideal age for beginning dating, with any dating earlier than 18 being ‘premature’ (Yao and Yang 1994: 277). As Børge Bakken (1993) further points out, the discourse of ‘premature love’ in China constructs adolescent sexuality as a social problem, which once identified, is found to be omnipresent, even occurring in primary schools. A description of ‘premature love’ in a 1996 essay by Jia Chunjiang, of the Shanghai Guangming High-school, emphasizes both the perceived temptations and dangers of ‘premature love’ for high-school students:

There were two students who made a date to meet in a park, in the deepest part of the woods, so they could experience the taste of a first kiss. They agreed to close their eyes, count to three and then let their two pure pairs of lips gently touch. But at the end of counting to three, they opened their eyes and they had yet to kiss. This is a blind imitation of dating fashions among Western youth, treating kissing as though it were a childish game, a way of satisfying a temporary urge. It shows a lack of self-respect and a lack of respect for the affections of the other person, and it is extremely frivolous. Besides, there is a great difference in the ways of courtship among the citizens of our country and those of Western countries. We cannot blithely imitate Westerners and violate the traditional moral principles of the Chinese people. Despite the fact that Chinese law and social morality does not allow middle-school students to satisfy sexual desires in the fashion of a man and a wife, still there are a small number of students who secretly taste ‘forbidden fruit’, using kissing, hugging, petting, and ways we cannot even imagine to satisfy sexual desires. While taking into account their different circumstances, we have to educate and counsel them (Jia 1996: 14).

This published description reveals some of the common ideological obsessions of Chinese educational authorities of the early reform era, including the dangerous influences of Western culture and the grounding of sexual morality in national traditions. While warning against the dangers of blind imitations of the West, educators also defend the need to educate youth in a ‘scientific’ fashion, often borrowing from examples of sex education abroad. Scientific sexual morality is framed as a middle path between ‘feudal’ silence on sexual issues and false western doctrines of ‘sexual liberation’ and ‘personal freedom’ (Lin 1988; Yao and Yang 1994). To extrapolate, adolescent education literature in 1980s China often described ‘premature love’ as the first step to sexual degeneracy and crime, especially for young girls. In fact, 90 per cent of juvenile offences for young women in China Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 107 in the 1980s were sex offences, including prostitution but also many sexual transgressions in which no money was exchanged (Bakken 1993: 49). Sex educators in the 1990s continued to warn that premarital sexual relations were not ‘protected’ by the marriage law (Jia 1996; Shen 2002), meaning that such relationships were not recognized by state authorities not that they were actually illegal (Evans 1997: 103). Throughout the 1990s, Chinese schools continued to maintain their rules against sexual intercourse among students. Universities expelled students for violations of rules against sexual intercourse, especially violations considered too flagrant to ignore. According to interviews with university officials in 1995 and 1996, a student couple at one Shanghai university was expelled when faculty discovered that the young woman had been sleeping in the young man’s bunk for several weeks, despite the presence of seven other men in the room. Another university expelled a woman accused of prostitution and a young man with multiple sex partners. As a high-level administrator and expert on adolescent education at a Shanghai teachers-training university said in a personal interview in 1995:

We will take action against them if we find out about it [sexual intercourse]. If a girl gets pregnant, the school will kick them out. Now it may be that a girl will get pregnant and go deal with it herself by going and getting an abortion during the break, but if we find out, then we will kick them out .... I always tell my students that we are in China and cannot possibly escape from traditional Chinese morality. It is not something we can decide for ourselves ... I tell these students, sexual morality in China is changing, but there is one thing that will not change and that is the millennia-old norm of chastity.

This statement seems dated in the sexually liberal climate of Shanghai. In 2005, the Ministry of Education finally allowed university students to marry, but most universities kept in place these long-standing rules against premarital sex (usually with Party Secretary making the final disciplinary recommendation including occasional expulsions (interview with Pan Suiming, October 2005). By making themselves privileged spokespersons of Chinese morality, administrators and educators defend their authority against the values of the larger society in which engaging in premarital sex is increasingly viewed as merely another personal choice. Yet this officially sanctioned code of premarital chastity has only a partial hold over officials themselves. Younger guidance counsellors at the same university in Shanghai told me in interviews in 1995 that they sometimes ‘looked the other way’, even in cases of pregnancy, which constitutes clear grounds for expulsion according to university rules. A discreet warning to ‘be careful’ was often the first action against students who otherwise had a good relationship with faculty members. Faculty agreed that it was increasingly rare for students, especially local Shanghai students, to be caught having sex, given the new availability of 108 James Farrer places to meet off campus for sex and the easy access and anonymity of abortion in Shanghai. However, because they are unevenly enforced, these regulations can subject students to the arbitrary exercise of administrative authority. In a 2000 interview, Xiaohong, a 20 year-old female informant, described the arbitrary enforcement of high-school rules against dating. To use her own words:

In our class, boys sat with boys and girls sat with girls. They controlled us very strictly ... Sometimes teachers are easier on better students. Some are actually harder. It depends on the teacher. For instance, one of our English teachers was especially easy on students who were good at English. If a student had poor English grades, he was quite happy to embarrass them in front of the class, irrespective of whether they were male or a female. However, when a good student did something wrong, he did not say anything.

As other young people explained, teachers could decide whom to prosecute for violations of rules. Therefore, good students and children of influential parents often had more latitude in their dating behaviour. Despite these restrictions on dating behaviours, youth in present-day China have developed their own more permissive sexual standards primarily based on a code of romance. Recourse to such a code allows many students an ethical standpoint of resistance to school policies. Indeed, the local politics of romantic story-telling among Chinese youth has begun to form the cultural basis for an ethical/political critique of school authority, as the next section of this chapter shows.

Romance as resistance The Chinese school system is indeed producing a new type of sexual subject, not the compliant, diligent subject intended by adolescent education, but rather a resistant subject, clever in avoiding authority and inventive in applying alternative ethical standards. These resistant ethical standards are not the product of state education. They are a mix of public and private conversations about romance and pleasure in which students incorporate ideologies familiar from Hollywood movies and Taiwanese love stories into stories of real people around them. One can scarcely find a junior high-school girl in Shanghai who has not read the works of Taiwanese romance author, Qiong Yao (1996). Likewise, older women in Shanghai often watch episodes of USA television serials such as ‘Sex and the City’ on pirated DVDs. This simultaneously transnational and very local politics of romantic story-telling has begun to form the cultural basis for an ethical/political critique of school authority. In a rather prosaic and typical story of high-school love, for example, Xiaohong criticizes the arbitrary enforcement of school proscriptions on teenage romance by describing her own first love with a boy in the same homeroom class during her second year in high-school. Her story shows how teachers used Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 109 a mix of direct intervention and public shaming to control students. To use her own words:

This was a very innocent and pure love. We didn’t even kiss. Can you believe that? We would go for a meal or go out walking together. His math was good, so sometimes we would do homework together. He was good to me ... We did not try to hide our relationship in school. We were too obvious about it. If you act like that in school, then people will notice it. The teacher, during class one time, made fun of him in front of the class. The teacher said to him: ‘Oh, you are so happy, you have fallen into the flower garden’. Everyone knew what the teacher was talking about. After this the teacher took him aside to talk. I did not know this. My boyfriend did not tell me at the time. Just recently when we met he told me that the teacher talked to him more than once about our relationship, but he ignored the teacher. Of course the teacher had his methods. He used an excuse to bring the boy’s parents to the school, and told them .... The teacher did not say anything to me. Teachers allow the girls to keep their face in front of other people, so they talk to the boy. Girls won’t be able to take the humiliation. Boys can take it better... When the boy broke up our relationship he did not say anything to me. He just wrote me a letter. He did not give me any reasons. Maybe he was trying to keep from hurting me, but actually this hurt me very much. He said that he only had short-term feelings for me. He said he was not the sort of person who could love someone a long time. This hurt. I really hated him. My whole third year in high-school I didn’t say a word to him ...

Despite opposition to young love from teachers, Xiaohong said that dating was very common in her high-school. She readily recalled numerous stories of love affairs. One famous story in her school involved two junior high students two years behind her. Both students had problems with their families. The teacher opposed their love affair and ridiculed them in front of other students. According to the story passed around among students, the two students stole savings from their families and ran off to the romantic tourist spot of Huangshan, in Anhui Province, where they committed suicide by jumping off the scenic cliffs. According to Xiaohong, students in the school argued about the details of this story, debating what actually happened, the causes of the joint suicide and the relative responsibilities of the students, parents and teachers. As I have argued in a larger study of youth sex culture in Shanghai, such shared stories are the principle substance of moral discourse among youth (Farrer 2002a, 2002b). Students use such stories to argue about the relative goodness and badness of relationships. Xiaohong’s stories represent this politics of shared story-telling. She justifies her own relationship on the basis of romantic feelings and criticizes her former partner for his apparent weak feelings for her. As she said herself, the failure of her romance with him was judged not by her alone but by others who shared and heard her story. She worried that her friends would 110 James Farrer think he had casually dumped her, so his saying he did not really love her hurt her more than the teacher’s interference. Although high-school students in China often cite romantic feeling as an ethical standpoint of resistance against school authority, the practical application of this romantic ethos is conditioned by the regime of control that exists in a given school. In another story from Xiaohong’s school, two senior high-school students persisted in their relationship despite the teacher’s opposition. In this case, also described by Xiaohong, their success depended on the collaboration of their parents. As Xiaohong explained:

The teacher talked to the boy and to the girl, and then to the boy’s parents and to the girl’s parents. But they stayed together. Even though they broke up after going to college, they were together all during their last year of high-school. The parents didn’t care, so the teachers couldn’t do anything about it ... I think that parents are the biggest factor. If the parents support you then you are okay. If your parents are also against you then you are finished, because you are a student and still dependent on your parents. What a teacher says to you is not as influential as what a parent says. In any case, you have not broken any laws and you have not got pregnant.

This story suggests that effective resistance to the regime of school controls is possible if parents take part in the resistance. Such a situation is rare. Parents may support their children if they feel they have been treated unfairly, but most parents will side with the teachers in the hopes of not spoiling their child’s progress in the education system. Nevertheless, the ethos of romance infiltrates and forms a subversive heteroglos- sic dialogue within official discourses on teenage sexuality. Even cautionary conservatives, such as Jia (1996: 12–14), speak in two voices about the ethical value of early adolescent romance. In Jia’s previously mentioned story about the two students kissing in the park, premature love is ‘impulsive’ and ‘muddled’. But, at the same time, the innocent love of young people, with its presumed naive selflessness, is also a model of romantic virtue. Youthful passions are invariable described as ‘pure’ and ‘natural’. Even official arguments against ‘premature love’ thus can hardly avoid the implication that it is an especially sweet and desirable kind of love. In short, my point is not that romance is always an effective standpoint of resistance against school authority: often it fails in the face of school and family opposition. Nevertheless, a shared culture of premarital romance is in effect the avenue through which Chinese young people can define and claim their sexual rights through informal schoolyard gossip, meeting opposition along the way, but frequently succeeding in claiming some space for autonomous, if secretive, action. However, informal schoolyard gossip is not the only communicative space in which Chinese youth are able to develop and exercise sexual citizenship. In contemporary China, media spaces, especially the internet, allow young people Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 111 an opportunity to speak to a wider public about premarital sexual ethics in ways that sometimes directly oppose official policies.

The public sphere of intimate matters An example of how the Chinese media can work as a public space for sexual discussion is the widely publicized story of two 19-year-old college students, Ma and Lin, who in October 2002 were expelled from the Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications for having premarital sex (Pan 2003: 1). The fact that these students were expelled was not unusual. Thousands of Chinese students have been expelled from universities for violating the rules against premarital sex, often when the girl became pregnant, as did Ma. Ma had an abortion, and the school discovered the pregnancy through a university clinic and decided to expel both students. Ma’s parents were initially angry with her, but then turned their anger on the university. Ma’s father formally sued the university in the courts for violating her rights both to privacy and education (ibid.). Ma’s direct use of rights discourse, and concomitant appeal to the courts, marks a new awareness of liberal conceptions of citizenship in China. In ethnographic fieldwork on youth sexuality in Shanghai in the 1990s, I found several cases of parents who contested such disciplinary actions, but always informally with school authorities, never in court (Farrer 2002). What also made this case unusual was Ma’s family’s willingness to go public with her case, and the public debate that ensued. Electronic media reposted an initial report in the liberal-leaning Beijing Youth Daily (Beijing qingnian bao) and youth began debating the issue on internet electronic bulletin boards (‘Yiqi tongzhu huaiyun daxuesheng beikaichu shijiande diaocha’ 2002). Ma, the student expelled for premarital sex, further defended her relationship in an interview with the Washington Post. Ma stated: ‘Why should we confess when we had done nothing wrong. I did not agree that what we did was immoral. Sex is a matter of emotion, not morality’ (Pan 2003: 1). Like most of the Chinese youth I interviewed in Shanghai, therefore, Ma rejects official ‘morality’ with its rules of premarital chastity by referring to a new ethical standard of ‘feelings’, namely, ganqing. For Chinese youth ganqing is the new touchstone for sexual behaviour. Almost all young urban Chinese now accept the idea that premarital sex is permissible when it is accompanied by romantic feelings. Even in rural areas this idea is becoming dominant, partly as a result of media exposure (Yan 2002: 29–53). Ma managed to redeem herself in the court of public opinion, but not in the real courts. In the end, the courts found that Ma did not have a ‘right’ to a university education and that the university system was free to set standards for student behaviour. After she lost her case and her appeal, Ma announced she was planning to study abroad. Her boyfriend Lin, from a poor rural family, had no plans. The differing outcomes for Ma and her boyfriend clearly show how poorer citizens effectively enjoy fewer sexual rights in China, as opposed to the wider choices of the rich, including studying abroad. 112 James Farrer Nonetheless, Ma’s story illustrates how the media can work as a space for lively public debate on official school policies in China. The development of this public sphere of intimate matters is not a sudden event. Some public discussions of sexuality have always occurred in China. Even during the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976), a period when public discussion of sexuality was allegedly taboo, hand-copied books allowed readers to share scatological sexual stories (Honig 2003: 143–75). But the media in which discussions of sex and sexuality take place in China have changed. Following the Chinese Communist Party’s negation of the Cultural Revolution and introduction of market reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s, literary journals and novels became the primary medium for the revival of romantic love as an ethical discourse. In the mid 1980s, readers of popular magazines debated in letters to the editor on then controversial topics such as extramarital love, divorce and virginity. Radio call-in shows were the popular interactive forum in the early 1990s, eclipsed by television in the late 1990s. Now young viewers watch foreign programmes on DVD, thereby bypassing state censors. The internet is the most open medium of all for discussions of sex and sexuality in present-day China: there are virtually no taboo sexual topics. A popular government-run site for students includes such titles as: ‘A male view on eating the forbidden fruit: if you love me, give it to me’, ‘Summer-break trial marriages: is it a fashion or a problem?’ and ‘Nanjing University girl students openly buy condoms’ (Zhongguo xiaoyuan wang 2002). There are also numerous informa- tional web pages where students can learn about homosexuality, AIDS and contraception. In comparison to earlier media, the internet allows for more response to and criticism of editorial voices. For instance, an article on an etang.com bulletin board claimed that 80 per cent of students engaging in ‘premature love’ had problems in their relationship with their parents (‘Zhuanjia tongji qingshaonian bacheng zaolian wenti yuanzi jiazhang zeren’ 2002). Rather than addressing this purported claim, visitors leaving messages on the bulletin board attacked the premise of the article, essentially dismissing the idea that ‘premature love’ is a social problem. One message writer quoted a popular pun: ‘Isn’t premature love really just early practice?’This pun plays on the different meanings of words with the same sound in the Chinese language, i.e. zaolian(ai) (zao = early, lian(ai) = love, (duan)lian = exercise, practice), meaning that high-school dating is good practice for love affairs later in life. Referring to the dominant youth ethos of romance another writer asked: ‘Is love a crime?’This visitor used the language of ‘rights’ to further argue: ‘Maybe it is because this older generation never had love, so they want to take away the rights of other people to have love’. A third visitor replied sarcastically: ‘If someone tells me that they have finished high-school and never dated, then either they are a pervert or their reproductive system has a problem’ (ibid.). More and more people in China are using the internet to tell sexual stories that violate the hetero-normative story of courtship leading to marriage, claiming rights to engage in relationships that are not committed, monogamous or heterosexual. Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 113 Increasingly, the sexually radical challenge the notion that sexual relationships must be based on love. For instance, in June 2003, the magazine columnist Mu Zimei began a wildly popular website that describes her sexual adventures with numerous men and was viewed by millions of internet surfers in China (Online. 14 February 2004). Following the pattern of Shanghai Baby, government censors stopped publication of her biographical diary, ‘Yiqingshu’, though it is easily available on-line at numerous websites, for example, Sina.com at http://book.sina.com.cn/nzt/1068520434_yiqingshu (accessed 14 February 2004). The censorship contributed to a global notoriety that already includes an interview with The New York Times, the gold standard for sexual dissident status. Mu Zimei told the Times reporter: ‘I do not oppose love, but I oppose loyalty; if love has to be based on loyalty, I will not choose love’ (Yardley 2003). Mu Zimei’s cavalier attitude toward sex without love drew criticism from many of her internet readers, many of whom still hold romantic feelings to be the ethical touchstone for sexual relationships (Zeng 2003). This increasingly public argument about the necessity of romantic ‘feelings’ for sexual relations, had the consequence of simultaneously challenging this romantic sexual ethos, and affirming it as the new conventional standard. In addition to its uses for spreading information about love and sexuality, the internet in China is becoming popular as a site for actually conducting high-school love affairs. This type of on-line dating, and the face-to-face meetings that often follow, are largely outside the control of school authorities. However, the Chinese state is not giving up on the project of adolescent education: it too uses the popular medium of television to educate an increasingly privatized population on sexual topics. Many programmes co-opt the voices of ‘ordinary people’ through audience participation. But audiences do not always perform as expected. Such programmes can become spaces for a cacophonous discussion of moral and ethical issues surrounding sexuality. The next section provides an extended example of such a programme.

Unruly audiences: Family Matters On 2 August 2002, the Shanghai Television Station aired a discussion of adolescent sex education, ‘Growing pains’ (chengzhangde fannao), on a regular programme entitled Family Matters (qinqin baijiaren). On Family Matters, experts face off in discussions with panels of ordinary people and selected audiences, usually from the same workplace. In this episode, the panel consisted of about 20 high-school students, facing adult audience members from a hotel and a driving school. The panel of celebrity commentators included: Wei Lan, the host of a popular radio programme on family issues; a radio deejay; and a sociologist specializing in sex education. This particular episode of Family Matters began with one of the two announcers inviting a 16-year-old high-school student to speak about sex and sex education. The boy confidently addressed the audience: ‘I came onto this programme to tell teachers and parents that sex education is healthy, we should all talk about it 114 James Farrer openly and freely and not avoid it’. The announcer followed: ‘Yes, sex education is a sensitive and difficult topic. But everyone who comes here at least shares the idea that this is something we should talk about’. He turned to a middle-aged man from among the employees at the driving school and asked him what he thought about sex education. The man replied: ‘Talking about this in front of so many people, I am quite embarrassed’. As if surprised, the announcer asked: ‘So would you let your child come onto this programme and talk about sex education and sex?’ ‘I don’t think I would agree to it’, the man responded. The woman announcer chuckled at this uncooperative but honest answer. And the male announcer continued: ‘It seems that this programme has turned into the adolescents coming to give the middle-aged people a sex education class’. The audience proceeded to laugh. But for the rest of the programme, the students talked and the experts and adult audience members mostly listened. The students on Family Matters first were asked to describe their experiences of puberty, and, on this issue, the boys proved to far more positive and assertive than girls. One boy described feeling proud of becoming a man, and discussed comparing muscles, whiskers and body height with his friends. Another boy remembered brushing his hand up against a girl’s hand and noticing that it was ‘so soft, so tender and pretty’. Yet another boy described feeling that he had grown up, so now he could invite girls out. In this discussion of puberty, the girls seemed far shier. One girl said that as soon as she began to realize her body was changing, she recognized that boys were different, and began to want a greater distance from them. Another girl described a male cousin coming to her house and wanting to sleep with her in the same bed and her refusing. She said she still feels uncomfortable thinking about this today. As in other public contexts, therefore, Chinese girls on this particular episode of Family Matters were able to provide fewer positive stories of becoming a woman than boys could about becoming a man. One high-school girl said that ‘being a girl is a lot of trouble; being a boy is easy’. Another girl criticized sex education in which maintaining chastity is described as a girls’ problem. ‘Why are girls seen as having to protect themselves while boys are seen as not needing any sex education?’ she asked. The audience applauded. The programme thus gave a voice to girls protesting the gender roles enforced through traditional adolescent sex education. Male and female students also used the programme to criticize teacher’s attitudes toward student’s sexual curiosity. One girl told how an experience during adolescence had left a deep impression on her. She was sitting at school, reading Romeo and Juliet, and was absorbed in the passage about them kissing, when a teacher came up and took the book from her. The teacher looked at the title and then she looked at the passage the girl had been reading. She then looked at the girl as if her eyes were going to pop out of her head. As the female student explained: ‘The teacher thought that a fourth-year student reading Romeo and Juliet was not normal behaviour, and here I was completely absorbed in this kissing scene. So my way of thinking had to be unhealthy, very unhealthy’ [here the announcer Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 115 interjected that Romeo and Juliet is a good book, and he wished he had read it when he was young]. ‘Anyway’, the girl continued, ‘the teacher made a big stink about it at school and she asked my parents to come to the school to talk about it with her’. After hearing this particular story, the announcer on Family Matters attempted to reassure the audience that this unwarranted intervention on the part of a teacher had not had a negative impact on the girl’s development. As he asked the student: ‘So do you now think that students reading about romance and kissing is normal?’ She replied: ‘No’, saying that the incident had left her with the deep impression that it is ‘depraved’ for women and men to kiss. Not quite sure how to respond to this answer, the announcer said: ‘Oh, this has become a serious mental block, it seems’, and quickly moved on. The gap in the flow of the programme was brief but revealing. This young woman had failed to become a healthy modern sexual subject for whom kissing was ‘normal’. Her authentic protest could not be excluded, but neither could it be effectively incorporated into the story of modern, confident youth that the programme was conveying. Next, a boy further criticized the attitudes of teachers towards adolescent sexuality by relating one of his own negative experiences. He explained that he was supposed to meet with a group of classmates after school one day to help a new girl from Taiwan buy books. Unfortunately, none of his classmates showed up, so he had to take the girl shopping alone. A teacher saw them meeting at the gate of the school. Later, after attending a parent–teacher meeting, his parents came home and asked him if he was dating. The boy replied: ‘If that counts as dating, then I have dated countless girls’. As he continued, ‘I felt like complaining to the teacher, but I didn’t. I just thought, “I don’t care what you think”. In reality, however, I have a clear stance on the problem of “premature love”: I definitely will not be dating while I am still in school’. Another boy criticized the negative approach of teachers to adolescent sexuality by stating that he thought that a certain amount of dating in high-school was okay, and that sexual activity could wait until later. To use his own words, ‘We should be able to have some experience in dating without losing our chastity too early. In dealing with such issues, teachers should not compel [students to follow certain forms of behaviour] by saying that this is bad and that is good. Rather, they could counsel you and help you analyse what advantages and disadvantages the situation has for you, and let you make a decision based on what you know yourself’. Thus, some students openly contest the rules against dating in schools. Concurrently, the language of their complaints, including their occasional use of the official expression ‘premature love’, shows the degree to which they adopt elements of the official discourse even as they resist it. The next set of questions that the organizers of Family Matters put to the students involved sexual knowledge. Some students said they were learning about sexuality primarily from sexually explicit Japanese modern fiction. Others said that they had seen pornographic videos. Most mentioned their own private reading of sex education articles in books and magazines. One claimed to be learning about sex from reading English-language books on sex education with a dictionary, 116 James Farrer allowing him to see how poor sex education in China was in comparison to foreign countries. Students complained that parents said nothing to them about puberty and sexuality, nor did they learn much from sex education at school. At the same time, students talked about using a ‘scientific’ attitude to face up to sex, incorporating the language of the sex education books they were reading. In other words, students incorporate discourse from state education into their critiques of state educational practices, showing how critical discourse cannot be easily separated from official culture. Wei Lan, the celebrity talk show host on this particular episode of Family Matters, replied that it was important to start sex education early. To illustrate this point, she related the following story:

Two sets of parents came to talk to me, worried to death. Both of them brought in their 17-year-old children. The parents of the boy got down on their hands and knees and pleaded with me to help them. The parents of the girl also knelt down. ‘Oh no’, I said, ‘this girl is more than eight months pregnant’ [the male announcer exclaims: ‘More than eight months’]. Yes, more than eight months. I said: ‘It is so obvious, can’t you parents see this?’ But they were not willing to ask, not willing to see. You could see clearly that her stride and her physique were not normal, but the parents were thinking: ‘How can it be that they already know about it [sex]. How can it be that they would go and do it?’ So I went and found the Hospital Head of the Shanghai Women and Infant Care Hospital, who was about to go abroad on a trip. He said: ‘You came to the right person. No one else can solve this problem. Once you go beyond 80 days, you can’t touch it [i.e. have an abortion]’. Only the Hospital Head could approve an abortion. The whole time I was thinking, how can 17-year-old children be so ridiculous? They were so worried that the teacher would find out, as if letting the teacher know what had happened meant that things would get more serious.

Typical of much discourse on adolescent education, Wei Lan blames the students’ ignorance for their difficulties (and teachers and parents for keeping them ignorant). Better education and a scientific attitude could eliminate their ignorance. She does not mention the larger institutional constraints on their behaviour; the students legitimate fears of permanent black marks on their personal files, or even of being sent to a reform school; a national birth control policy which would make a premarital birth disastrous for the girl; and constraints on the rights of the girl to make a decision about the pregnancy. Nor does she bother to address the ethics and health risks of an abortion after eight months of pregnancy, though the shock on the announcer’s face was clear. The announcers concur that there is not enough sexual information out there, neither enough education nor enough communication. This discussion shows the limits of the rhetoric of ‘education’ in critiquing institutionalized social problems, even as it highlights the politics of sexual story-telling. Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 117 Based on previous ethnographic research I have conducted in Shanghai (Farrer 2002), the incidents described in this particular episode of Family Matters are quite common, including teachers’ harassment of students for reading romantic novels, teachers’ interference in casual friendships between boys and girls, and teachers’ meetings with parents over the problem of ‘premature love’. The frequency of late-term abortions is a secretive topic in China. Yet clearly high-school students are having abortions in increasing numbers, and usually secretly in that they go to public clinics which do not report the incidence to their schools (Cai Min 2002). Nonetheless, through programmes like Family Matters, a wide variety of people in China are able to participate in public conversations about sexuality and explicitly criticize state policies, such as the kind of sex education provided in schools. Occasionally, they even broach taboo issues such as abortion, with embarrassed silences conveying as much as explicit critiques. Despite Wei Lan’s tendency to blame youth and parents, her discussion of abortion functioned to briefly introduce even this controversial topic into the arena of public debate. While the producers of Family Matters largely embrace a model of the autonomous and self-monitoring sexual citizen free to decide his or her own values in a public conversation, the programme also exposes the institutional limits of Western liberal conceptions of sexual citizenship in China. Sexual rights are not simply a question of open speech and education, even though both are limited in China. The responses of some of the students on Family Matters reveal their failure to autonomously deal with their problems, thereby highlighting the need for counselling services and medical support, which the state is ill prepared to deliver. Viewed in this context, full sexual citizenship also requires a responsive state willing to devote resources to young people’s sexual, psychological and reproductive health. In addition, the show illustrates that the Chinese state does not speak with a single voice. Increasingly, state-owned entities, and even governing agencies, are becoming autonomous economic actors. This commercialization of state functions creates a pattern of uneven social controls on sexuality, unevenly distributed resources for self-help, and uneven opportunities for sexual dissidence. The next section therefore discusses how China’s market economy is creating new spaces for public discussion of sex and love, but also spaces that confer varying rights of participation depending on personal income.

Marketing sexual stories As the example of Family Matters suggests, the media in China are now commercial businesses focused as much on audience ratings as on politics. To offer one example of how the politics of sexual story-telling is both enabled and shaped by the growth of the market economy in Shanghai, in 1999, a Chinese colleague and I were invited to be unpaid ‘consultants’ for what was described to us as a new marriage introduction service run by a local street committee government 118 James Farrer in Shanghai. We arranged to meet the manager of the marriage service the next day and observe its operations at the street committee office in north Shanghai. The meeting began with a sumptuous banquet at a gigantic Cantonese restaurant with waitresses whizzing past on roller skates. ‘Boss Tang’, as he liked to be called, was a Nanjing entrepreneur who ran his marriage service in Shanghai as a de facto private business only loosely monitored by the street committee. He also invited two other marriage ‘experts’ from local universities as well as two officials from the neighbourhood committee and an employee of the telephone company, a personal friend I presumed. I also presumed our purpose was to provide ‘expert’ advice, but the advice was never asked for. Boss Tang was an ebullient and diminutive fireball of a man, with no time for the guarded niceties usually administered to the ‘foreign expert’. When we did talk about the marriage service, Boss Tang talked and we listened. He saw the marriage market as a world of increased competition in which his company could help individuals get a leg up on competitors. For instance, he said, ‘out-of-town girls’ (wailaimei) are now increasingly big competition for the divorced woman, an important client of marriage services. A few years back divorced women from Shanghai could very easily find a man, he said, but now they needed extra help. In conjunction with the marriage service, the entrepreneur was developing a variety of other businesses: a love and sexuality hotline; a face-to-face counselling service; public lectures; and a vaguely defined ‘friendship service’, through which even married people could find ‘friends’ of the opposite sex. After the banquet we returned to the offices of the marriage service, where we were free to observe some of its activities in the rundown offices of the neighbourhood community and overshadowed by a noisy new freeway. As we toured the office, Boss Tang snapped photos of us ‘consultants’ to be used in marketing the marriage service. The hotline was run out of the same office as the marriage service. Callers’ problems most frequently were about extramarital affairs, sexual satisfaction in marriage and the problems of premarital cohabitation, Boss Tang said. As a rule women took calls from men, and a man, usually Boss Tang himself, took calls from women. He enjoyed this work and maintained his cheerful joking style on the phone, and he sometimes made appointments to speak with these women privately about their problems, if they wanted to continue contact. The three young women who worked in the office were Chinese literature majors, also from outside Shanghai. Like Boss Tang, they had no formal training in counselling, though a few volumes of reference advice were available for them to use. The women said they most often used these references to dispense advice about sexual dysfunctions. While the rhetoric used to justify and advertise this particular hotline was scientific and therapeutic, actual hotline workers employed the language of everyday conversation and flirtation to keep callers on the line as long as possible. Although Boss Tang said he instructed them to let ‘clients’ first explain their problems, in fact the women employed assertive, but otherwise distinct, styles in the calls they took during our visit. I heard one young woman purring on in a sensual and soporific monologue about the meaning of love for half an hour, Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 119 scarcely letting the caller speak about his problems with his girlfriend. Another woman worker patiently reminded a man of his responsibilities to his wife, while expressing sympathy for his problem with a ‘mistress’ who was ‘cheating’ on him. Even more than directive advice, this loquacious sympathy seemed the primary service they provided, especially to men in extramarital affairs unlikely to find sympathy elsewhere. Therefore, while the advice they gave generally supported the traditional conjugal family, they also offered sympathetic emotional support for sexual feelings outside of marriage. The wordy talking strategies of the women who worked at the hotline also served to keep the callers on the line. The callers paid one yuan a minute, so that the typical half hour call cost 30 yuan, 60 per cent of which was taken by the telephone company (explaining the presence of the telephone company employee at the banquet). Boss Tang explained excitedly that he saw the services he provided as a syner- getic business plan. For Boss Tang, caller’s stories represented opportunities to engage the caller in further services, such as counselling, lectures and marriage introductions. In his own words, ‘We want to make money from marriage introductions. We want to make money by getting them to call in with their problems. We want to make money when they come to our lectures. We also want to make money by recording their cases and serializing them in books’. Boss Tang was in fact collecting stories for publishing in a written collection inspired by the popular work of An Dun (1999). Even in that short visit, we heard many fascinating and compelling stories from the staff: stories of a man caught between a wife he did not love and a mistress who ‘cheated’ on him; of a woman whose husband could not satisfy her sexually; of a man who did not know how to ask his wife if she was sleeping with another man, and of a young man whose girlfriend wanted sex twice a day (‘Is this a sickness?’ the uncertain phone-line worker asked me, the foreign expert). As for the yet unpublished volume, Boss Tang said that the stories would be chosen and edited to fit ‘reader interest’. The point of this example is not to bash Shanghai’s hotlines, most of which are public-spirited, free operations with a less commercial focus than Boss Tang (see Erwin 2000: 145–70). Even Tang’s hotline service seemed helpful to some callers, although financially exploitive. However, this hotline is, in one sense, typical of the sexual public sphere in Shanghai, which is powerfully allied with commerce. The market promulgates sexual stories, but not as a public good. Technologies of commerce prevail, including paid-for sympathy and commercial dating. Whether such commerce strengthens or weakens the public sphere of sexual discourse is a complex question that cannot be conclusively answered here. Nonetheless, this example highlights several important issues. First, the Chinese ‘state’ is not a unitary centre of interests, but rather a centripetal entity spinning off private businesses and privately controlled political entities. Boss Tang’s hotline had become a de facto private venture, even though it began as a local government service. As Jo McMillan argues about the commercialization of the sex ‘aid’ industry in China, the state ostensibly regulates the market in sexual commerce, but more often abets the commercialization of sexual services (see the chapter 120 James Farrer by McMillan in this volume). Second, Boss Tang’s hotline illustrates how the institutions of the market enable and limit participation in public discussions of sexuality. On the one hand, the hotline enables some sexual stories to be told and heard, including some that seldom find such sympathetic audiences, particularly men and women who are involved in extramarital affairs. On the other hand, it excludes people unable to pay. Not everyone can buy advice and sympathy. The same conditions apply to many of the spaces described previously. Economically well-off youth with home internet access are better able to participate in public internet conversations than youth with no internet access. As Ma’s expulsion from university illustrates, money allows better access to the courts and to alternative avenues to pursue rights, such as education abroad. Money also buys access to privacy and decreased policing. For instance, in the 1990s, staying at a four or five star hotel purchased exclusion from the police ‘room checks’ on the activities of non-married couples that were common in cheaper hotels at that time. The new market economy thus creates varying zones of civic participation, rights and protections that depend largely on income.

Conclusion The public spaces of sexual story-telling in contemporary China that are described in this chapter are not an idealized ‘public’ free of commercial interests and state control. As Gail Hershatter (1996: 42–93) suggests, sexual stories are easily caught up in the various political, scientific, and commercial projects of powerful social agents. However, we should not ignore the loosely coordinated tactics and shared purposes of ordinary story-tellers. For Chinese youth, the sexual public sphere is a rhizomatic space in which private narratives and mass media stories are shared, compared and retold, avoiding state-imposed restrictions while using state-owned resources. Schoolyard gossip and the internet chat room are the ideotypical instances. Love stories are the ideotypical narratives. State agents also participate in organizing these public spaces in which youth articulate their new morality, including programmes like Family Matters, but participants do not always perform as intended. They may criticize state policies and point out social needs the state is unable to meet. As Boss Tang’s hotline service illustrates, presumed agents of the state may also be acting in ways largely uncoordinated with broader state policies. Both civil society and classic liberal models of sexual citizenship are relevant in describing this developing politics of sexual story-telling in China. In their conversations at school and on the internet, young men and women are collectively defining rights to engage in premarital sexual relationships. In many cases, they explicitly employ a language of rights to argue for state tolerance or to justify violations of school regulations. We can only hope that as mainstream heterosexual youth successfully define and claim various sexual rights, gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth also will be able to claim theirs. For now, their stories are appear- ing more and more on the internet, though far less often in the mainstream media. Sexual citizenship among Chinese youth 121 Even the classic liberal conception of natural rights is not without merit in describing these activities. As the Family Matters discussion shows, young people often base their claims to sexual rights on a natural human propensity to sexual and romantic activity. This view may be the result of a natural-science bias in Chinese education and a fondness for positivistic or essentialist arguments in Chinese sexology (see Evans 1997: 53). Whatever its origins, basing rights on biological nature is a powerful rhetorical device in a society that still holds science in high regard. Romance is the central ethical category in this politics of youth sexual story- telling in present-day China. Appropriating themes from a public culture dominated by commercial entertainment, Chinese youth have created new sexual standards expressed through stories of romantic feelings. Sexual dissidents often attempt to stretch the meanings of ganqing to encompass unconventional sexual encounters. For example, in a collection of stories of young urban Chinese women who engage in one-night stands, one narrator, Xiao Yun, asks rhetorically: ‘Who can say that a single night of love cannot still be called love?’ (Wang Ruoxi 2003: 12). Representative of many women I interviewed, her view is that short- term relationships still involve romantic feelings and are therefore good. These persistent arguments about the boundaries of romantic feelings highlight the centrality of ethical arguments to claims of sexual citizenship in China and the centrality of ganqing to these arguments. Some public story-tellers, such as Mu Zimei, explicitly challenged this new romantic standard, while reinforcing its status as the conventional view. With casual sex without love now at one end of the moral spectrum and premarital chastity at the other, Chinese young people can now hold up the romantic standard as the path of moderation, neither too ‘open’ nor too ‘traditional’ (based on discussions with students at Fudan University October 2005). In sum, it is important to bear in mind that all discourses of citizenship are simultaneously discourses of exclusion. Claims of sexual rights based on romantic feelings exclude relationships not based on feelings. The rhetoric of romantic feelings may challenge older ethical boundaries, but it also reinforces the exclusion of sexual ‘others’ whose sexual relationships do not appear to be based on romantic feelings, including: gay men who engage in anonymous sex in parks and saunas; sellers and buyers of sex; and women like Mu Zimei who pursue multiple casual sexual adventures. Thus, the politics of sexual story-telling itself is a process that will constantly produce outsiders and new forms of resistant narratives.

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(2003) ‘Internet sex column thrills, and inflames China’, New York Times, 30 November. ‘Yiqi tongju huaiyun daxuesheng beikaichu shijian de diaocha’ [An investigation of the two students who were expelled for cohabitation and pregnancy] (n.d.) www.fan8.com (accessed 2 December 2002). Zeng Jing (2003) ‘Zhuanfang Li Yinhe boshi: yongbuzhao dui Mu Zimei zuo daode pingjia’ [An exclusive interview with Dr. Lin Yinhe: there’s no need to pass a moral judgment on Mu Zimei], Xinlang guancha, 14 November, http://news.eastday.com/ epublish/gb/paper148/20031114/class014800012/hwz1043184/ (accessed 14 February 2004). ‘Zhuanjia tongji qingshaonian bacheng zaolian wenti yuanzi jiazhang zeren’ [Expert statistics: parents are responsible in eighty percent of the cases of youth engaging in premature love] (2002) www.etang.com (accessed 25 September 2002). Zhongguo xiaoyuan wang [Chinese campus network] (2002) ‘2002 nianchun, xing jiaoyu dada fangfang jin ketang’ [New Year 2002, sex education boldly enters the classroom], at www.54youth.com.cn (accessed 20 December 2002). 6 Selling sexual health: China’s emerging sex shop industry

Jo McMillan

Introduction Janine’s breasts are buoyed on a knotted blouse and her white knickers are pulled away from her hairless crotch. She pouts to the customer from the box of the ‘Vivid’ vibrating vagina, and she is ‘Hot!’ it says. Janine is on sale in the Guangdong Adult Goods Market, a dark warren of shop units, their glass walls papered from floor to ceiling with sex toy packaging. It is a kaleidoscope of exclamations and fractured flesh. Every available inch of this market in Guangzhou’s city centre is committed to the wholesale of sex. Every inch, that is, apart from a small plot in the middle, which houses a sober exhibition on sexual health. This tiny area is the disclaimer. At the heart of this vast, new entrepreneurial space is a political statement about social service and the public good. A young man despatched by the market manager escorts me round the exhibition displays on sexual development, sexual intercourse, fertilization, dysfunction and the treatment of disease. He shows me the market brochure, which stresses the educational efforts the management makes ‘in the public interest’. He points out a photograph of the well-known Beijing urologist Yang Wenzhi under a red banner saying ‘Sexual healthcare products – their uses and prospects – an academic seminar’. He shows me the message of congratulation from the president of the Chinese Sexology Association (CSA). My escort smiles at me. ‘We have the full support of our leaders’, he says. In this chapter, I chart the expansion of China’s sex shop industry from its documented beginnings in 1993. State encouragement of private enterprise in the reform era has allowed such shops to open, and many entrepreneurs have taken up the opportunity, with the market spreading from major urban centres into China’s rural townships. But it has not been an unregulated entrepreneurial bonanza. The dominant medicalized understanding of sex, combined with pornography laws, government-imposed standards and advertising restrictions, have all placed boundaries on how the sector operates. Thus, while the market has flourished, ideological and legal constraints have moulded its development and the industry has been obliged to present itself as an off-shoot of the healthcare sector. The de- eroticized presentation of sex goods, far from compelling a pleasureless experience of their use, can invite erotic transgression. But any connections with desire, Selling sexual health 125 power or play are held at a silent distance as the unspoken, private business of the individual customer. Controls on market freedom have at times, however, been subverted or ignored, and this has prompted calls for stricter regulation. The CSA, a professional body representing medics and academics in the sexology field, takes a lead role in industry management, but its effectiveness is compromised by financial entanglement with the industry itself. For most of the last decade, sex shops have been operating as ‘healthcare centres’ selling ‘medical aids’ for the sexually dysfunctional. I use the Adam and Eve, China’s first legal sex shop, and a selection of sex shop products, to exemplify how the medical paradigm has been typically realized in this market. In recent years, however, conflicting interests have been visibly tussling over the development of the industry, and the profit motive is pushing the market into areas that have no clear curative purpose. It is a driving force that is proving hard to resist. Medicine is retreating as the justificatory principle on which sex shops operate. Pleasure, fashion and what happens in ‘the West’ are taking its place. I look at two examples – a sex aid factory’s latest designs and the recent emergence of bondage gear – to suggest the direction in which the industry is moving.1

China’s expanding sex shop market A Chinese colleague once said that as a rule of thumb, tolerance of sexual matters is in direct proportion to distance from Beijing. The Adult Goods Market in the southern city of Guangzhou is certainly more diverse in what it sells than anything in the politically sensitive capital. Nonetheless, it is a Beijing sex shop that carries the distinction of being the first to open legally and officially in China. The Adam and Eve Healthcare Centre, a joint venture between the privately owned Beijing Life Guide Service Centre and the People’s Hospital, opened in February 1993 (‘First sex center opens’ 1993: 8). The then general manager of the shop, Wen Jingfeng, was wary of the initial success of the enterprise, fearing that political vicissitudes might see him accused of ‘bourgeois degeneracy’ (Blass 1993: 35). That did not happen, and instead the Adam and Eve served as an example for what has become a rapidly expanding market, with sex shops now found in rural townships as well as the cities (‘Experts call for plan to control sex shops’ 1999). There are no official statistics documenting the explosion of the sex shop industry in China, and even if there were, the fluidity of the market, with shops being set up and closing down with ease, would soon render them inaccurate. However, unofficial but informed estimates suggest that in July 1999 there were 200 to 300 shops nationwide (Shanghai Institute of Planned Parenthood Research, personal communication, July 1999), and just over one year later the figure had increased to around 200 sex shops in Beijing alone (Yang Wenzhi, interview, October 2000). Having been in China both of those years, my sense is that these estimates are reasonable. Sex shop entrepreneurs appear to have taken to heart the encouragement of Ren Zhongyu, Guangdong’s Party Secretary, who said 126 Jo McMillan in 1980: ‘If something is not explicitly prohibited, then move ahead .... If something is allowed, use it to the hilt’ (Becker 2000: 74). Some sex shops have proved more viable than others. The Adam and Eve, for example, can trade on its name as the industry mascot, and is rarely short of custom. On a visit in April 1999, there were 21 other people in the shop (19 men and 2 women), and that was at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, i.e. during working hours. Sales have since been bolstered by an online shopping service, which offers the advantage of anonymous browsing. By contrast, at the Hongliang sex shop in Shanghai, a customer is something of an event, a marked downturn in fortunes from its early days when it was impossible to move for the crowds of men around the displays, and when bicycles blocked the pavement outside (Zhu Yundi, shop manager, interview, April 2001). It has fast become a crowded market with competition from increasingly diverse outlets, and lesser-known retailers depend on occupying the tiniest premises, often little more than walk-in cubicles, to keep rents low, and on a huge mark-up in order to stay in business. As only prices for contraceptive goods are regulated by law – the profit margin on contraceptive goods is limited to 25 per cent – sex shops in China are free to charge all they can for their other stock (Chen Xiaoyu, former manager of the Adam and Eve sex shop, interview, January 2001). Mengfuhua, for example, a chain of what was originally 22 stores in Beijing, sets prices at a shop in Haidian, bordering an area known for cheap commercial sex, at roughly half that of iden- tical goods at its outlet opposite the exclusive Kunlun Hotel in the embassy part of town. This same chain has also introduced loyalty cards for its customers, offering 20 yuan of free goods for every 100 yuan spent in one of their stores. Prices might vary, but nowhere are they within easy reach of anyone except China’s wealthy middle class. The manager of the Adam and Eve sex shop described her clientele as members of the ‘better educated’ section of society who are ‘more open-minded about sex’ and ‘have money’ (Chen Xiaoyu, interview, July 2002). A mid-range vibrator at the Adam and Eve, for example, costs 580 yuan. This, according to the China Statistical Yearbook (2002: 145), is equivalent to the average monthly wage in an urban, collectively owned work unit. High prices might render sex shopping a middle class diversion, but demand for goods remains undented. Now, wholesalers have emerged to service the industry. Since 1997, retailers nationwide have been able to buy their wares from the Adult Goods Market in Guangzhou, while a similar market has since opened in Wuhan. In collaboration with the local Family Planning Committee, the Guangzhou market hosted its first annual trade fair in 1999, at which 147 work units had displays. The following year, similar numbers of enterprises participated, but this time the CSA had assumed its regulating role as one of the organizing bodies for the fair. The market has not, however, been free to develop without constraint, and a range of legal requirements have forced sex shops to operate according to a medicalized template. Selling sexual health 127

Negotiating ambiguous legal boundaries In legal terms, China’s sex shops are regarded as no different from any other business, and a special permit is not required to set one up (Pan Suiming, Professor and Director of the Institute for Research on Sexuality and Gender at the Renmin (People’s) University in Beijing, interview, April 1999). The products they sell, however, would appear to be prohibited under the 1990 ‘Decision by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress regarding the punishment of criminals who smuggle, produce, traffic in and disseminate pornographic articles’. This states that ‘obscene products include toys printed with pornographic pictures, sex products (xingpin), obscene drugs (yinyao) and obscene tools (yinju)’ (Zhongguo xing kexue baike quanshu 1998: 500–1). The 1990 Decision casts a wide, vague net of obscenity over many sex-related goods, but key, according to Lu Dachuan of the CSA, is the distinction between a sex toy (wanju) and a sex tool (gongju). While tools are permitted because purposeful and problem solving, toys are committed to no such cause. Retailers have recently tried to circumvent this linguistic nicety by avoiding reference to either play (wan) or work (gong) altogether, instead calling their goods ‘qiju’ (‘devices’) (interview, November 2000). Sex shop staff do not appear concerned by the uncertain legal position of the goods they sell. When it is suggested that they might be construed as obscene, staff refer not to the malleable stipulations of the law, but to use. Their job is simply to sell sexual healthcare items; the customer decides obscenity. These goods, they argue, can be used obscenely (a deployment never detailed), but they can also be used completely ‘normally’ to ‘satisfy a physiological need’. I asked a stall-holder in the Guangdong Adult Goods Market how she knew whether her sales would be put to obscene purposes. ‘You can tell by looking at people’s expressions’, she said. As if not quite convinced by that herself, she added: ‘This is all permitted! I pay tax on what I sell’, and she pointed to a certificate on the wall. ‘All completely legal!’ she declared (interview, January 2002). Delicacy of language applies not only to the labelling of sex shop goods. Sex shops themselves have been careful to take a name that locates them clearly within the curative camp, and the majority bill themselves as ‘healthcare centres’ (baojian zhongxin) – although in recent years the term ‘adult goods’ (chengren yongpin) has been used, and without an adverse reaction from the authorities. Sex shops are not allowed to sell pornography under Article 367 of the 1997 Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China (Wu 2000: 2). Prohibited are descriptions of the specifics of sexual behaviour, or crude erotic incitements. Shops are, however, allowed to sell marriage manuals and other ‘scientific works on human physiology and medicine’, alongside ‘literature or art with erotic content that has artistic value’ (ibid.). The consumption of sexualized images is widely portrayed as depraved and dangerous and production and distribution is criminal. There are on-going campaigns to ‘sweep away the yellow’ (sao huang), and in its more virulent phases, the state has executed people for their part in spreading ‘pornographic poison’ (Gao Dewei 1998: 110). 128 Jo McMillan Sex shops are also prohibited from selling imported sex goods, though that does not include items from Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen, from which home-grown foreign concessions a vast array of sex shop products enters the Chinese market. These tend to be rather more textually and visually explicit than products from other areas of China, typically with semi-naked women on the packaging and inducements in English such as ‘pussy that is always spread and waiting’ and ‘automatic fucker’. Translated into Chinese, these inducements would fall foul of anti-obscenity regulations, but there does not seem to be much official momentum for finding out exactly what is printed below the cleavage and the pout. Advertising laws further curtail the extent to which sex shops can promote their goods. Article 7 of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Advertisements states that advertisements should be healthy and observe social and professional morality, and that they should not contain pornographic, superstitious or disgusting content (Zhongguo jingji falü quanshu 1998: 1292). The specific advertising of sex aids and contraceptives has been prohibited since 1989, under regulations of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (Lusby 2002). This general ban is comprehensive (covering anything relating to sexual activities), but also ambiguous, and has been arbitrarily enforced. When 80 buses in Guangzhou, for instance, carried ads to mark the entry of the condom manufacturer, Jissbon, into the Chinese market, they had to be quickly withdrawn. A small number of condom-related advertisements have been able to circumvent the ban, but only by presenting themselves as public health announcements (ibid.). Despite this blanket prohibition on sex-related advertising, exceptions do occur, and sometimes in the oddest juxtapositions. The popular magazine Ren zhi chu [Human Origins] is an example. This magazine aims, according to its editor, to ‘correct people’s attitudes towards sexual knowledge’ especially those ‘mistaken concepts’ (cuowu guannian) that have gained ground in recent years, and to ‘re-enlighten’ (zai qimeng) the people (Lü Haimu, CSA conference paper, December 2000). In a similarly conservative vein, a recent edition of the magazine carried an editorial on the dangers of sexual revolution, arguing that ‘sexual indulgence and absolute sexual freedom can only lead to self-destruction, even to the extermination of a whole people’ (Fang 2003: 2). Yet, that same issue carried a box advertisement for an online sex shop on its back page, featuring a large- breasted white woman in a bikini. The shop stocks a number of imported goods, a range of SM gear, and items such as the ‘Chasey Lain creamy pussy’ vibrating vagina (www.shop.7cv.com. Site accessed February 2003). While sex shops themselves are clearly legal, laws that are ambiguous and open to interpretation govern the goods they sell. As is often the case in such situations, interpretations have been imaginative and wide. The sale of goods that to some observers would appear to flout the law, and the perceived ineffectiveness in curb- ing them, has led to fears that the industry is out of control. These fears have been coupled to concerns that goods fail to meet basic standards for hygiene and safety, and that what are supposed to be scientific instruments are being marketed with unjustified entrepreneurial hyperbole. There was clearly a need for better industry management. Selling sexual health 129

Attempts to manage the sex shop industry in present-day China Within just 3 years of the first sex shop opening in 1993, concerns were already being expressed that the rapid development of the industry had not been properly managed. At the First National Discussion Forum on the Present State and Future Prospects of the Sexual Healthcare Industry held in Chengdu in 1996, a number of problems were identified. One of these was a lack of standards for determining product quality, a problem which has since been addressed by requiring sex-aid manufacturers to apply to government departments for the relevant certificates for production, hygiene, food hygiene and family planning. These certificates are then submitted to retailers for display (Huaguang sex shop assistant, Shanghai, interview, 2001). Another problem the Forum identified was the unduly mercenary approach of some enterprises, which regarded healthcare products as a ‘licence to print money’. Some were capitalizing on deregulated prices, while others were passing cheap counterfeits off as something else, a practice so widespread that the government has instituted a ‘Combat Fakes Day’ (da jia jie) when there is concerted media exposure of counterfeit, substandard and illegal goods. Fraudulence in the sex goods industry has escalated since the arrival of Viagra on the Chinese market. A report from Xinhua News Agency estimated that 90 per cent of the blue lozenges sold in Shanghai were fakes (‘Faking it?’ 2001: 10), a figure that if anything is too low, since bona fide Viagra is only available on prescription from major hospitals, or on the black market where it costs 400 yuan per pill (Yang Wenzhi, interview, October 2000). A 2001 survey by the Shanghai Evening Post reported that 2,000 chemists and sex shops in the city stocked dubious blue lozenges under names such as Weige, Weineng and Weigewang, and sold an average of four per day, approximately 8,000 Viagra tablets daily. Keen to protect its position in such a ready and receptive market, Pfizer, the American manufacturer of Viagra, is working with government departments in a nationwide campaign against the many reported ‘Viagra rings’ (The Editor 2002: 16). The CSA has taken the leading role in the management of the sex shop industry. In September 1998, it established a Healthcare and Medical Products Specialist Committee (Baojian yiliao yongpin zhuanye weiyuanhui) to regulate the development and scope of the market and manage manufacturer–retailer relations (details from www.x.com.cn, and the links to ‘Zhongguo xing xuehui’, accessed January 2000). For entrepreneurs whose profits depend on latitude and tolerance, the CSA’s more focused interest in their activities would have appeared to be a worry- ing development. A politically conservative organization, the CSA is the professional umbrella for medics and academics working in sex-related fields, and is the institutional embodiment of the union of sex, medicine and morality. The organization is housed in the Medical Department of Beijing University, recruits most of its members from medical staff, and, according to Yang Wenzhi, a well- known urologist and leading member of the CSA, much of its training work is for ‘doctors who want to treat sexual problems’ (interview, October 2000). Its quarterly journal, Chinese Sexology (Zhongguo xing kexue), has a heavy medical bias, 130 Jo McMillan with a preference for articles on sexually transmitted infection, ‘abnormal’ sexualities, dysfunctions and sperm loss. The CSA has welcomed co-operation with the International Education Foundation (IEF), an American-based evangelizing coalition of the moral right, with links to the Unification Theological Seminary founded by Dr Sun Myung Moon. Its journal has given space to the organization’s activities in China, such as mass signings of a ‘purity pledge’ in a number of universities, and Richard Panzer, a close associate of the IEF and author of Condom Nation: Blind Faith, Bad Science, was afforded 27 pages to outline his ‘abstinence and fidelity’ message in two recent editions (Panzer 2000a: 29–43, 2000b: 29–40). A number of CSA members were involved in the publication of the Chinese Encyclopedia for Sexology, whose entry on sex shops devotes a significant proportion of its limited disclosures to explaining how people in the West close sex shops down by organizing pickets and convincing customers not to go in (Zhongguo xing kexue baike quanshu 1998: 413). With the traditionalist views of the CSA looming over them, entrepreneurs might have wondered about their prospects. They need not, however, have worried. The publications and pronouncements of the CSA might be philosophi- cally dutiful and morally conservative, but the organization has had to work hard for official favour. At the time of writing, the organization’s journal remained an internal publication and had still not been given permission to go on public sale, despite a placatory change of name from the broad invitations of the title ‘Sex Studies’ to the local and scientific ‘Chinese Sexology’. The CSA is also anything but over-funded. It occupies two spartan rooms in Beijing University, and its five staff all work part-time (Yang Wenzhi, interview, October 2000). One of the ways the straitened CSA raises funds is by selling endorsement plaques for sex shops to display (CSA member, interview, October 2000). The Guangdong Adult Goods Market, for instance, has a gold plaque beside the door stating that it is a member unit of the CSA, and individual members of the association endorse some of the goods on sale. In other words, the work of the CSA is compromised by its financial dependence on the market it is supposed to be regulating: it is a relationship of both confrontation and mutual need. James Farrer (2002: 56) suggests similar tensions exist in other parts of the ‘sex industry’ such as massage parlours, where ‘the state is as implicated in the creation of spaces for sexual entrepreneurship ... as it is in the repression and policing of these spaces’. Although the relationship between the industry and its regulator is tinged with ambiguity, the vast majority of sex shops steer a path away from censure, and, as the next section of this chapter shows, present themselves and their goods within the confines of the medical paradigm.

Inside a Chinese sex shop: selling medicalized sex The Adam and Eve Healthcare Centre is emblematic of the collocation of sex and medicine in present-day China. Located next to the People’s Hospital in Beijing, it has the aura of an outpatient department for people with sexual problems. Selling sexual health 131 At one time, it competed for custom with the neighbouring Beijing Medical University and People’s Hospital Medical Equipment Department, whose stock of vibrators and condoms jostled for space with bedpans and wheelchairs. By 2001, however, the Adam and Eve had monopolized the sexual dysfunction market in that corner of Beijing. Beside the door, a small display of ‘gifts for lovers’, mainly kitsch porcelain figurines of clad couples kissing, reminds the customer, as Farrer has documented in this volume, that romantic attachment is the ethical basis for embarking on a sexual relationship. Locked glass cases bristled with vibrators, vacuum pumps, aphrodisiacs, disinfectants and condoms. Only the sex education texts could be accessed without the professional benevolence of a member of staff. With plastic vines draped across the top of the display cases, and the strains of Tchaikovsky filling the air, the ambience in the Adam and Eve Healthcare Centre was one of sincere effort to put customers at ease. The shop assistants wore white lab coats, the former manager, Chen Xiaoyu, explaining that all her staff have medical training, hence the title yisheng (doctor) by which they go. They also have to have been married. Otherwise, the staff will not have had, or at least should not have had, relevant sexual experience. In other shops, such as the Hongliang in Shanghai, the white coat is thought justified on the grounds that, according to the shop manager, it ‘gives a better impression’. For the same reason, she said, older women have been recruited as shop assistants, as age is thought to suffocate any sexual spark. In most sex shops the medical ambience works, and customers do sit down at the table ornamented with a stethoscope, or behind the silk screen to confess their worries to the staff on duty (Personal observations, Shanghai sex shops, May 2000). But on occasion, staff efforts at conveying medical concern are swamped by boredom, and, at the sight of a customer, the assistant slopes off and comes back wearing the prescribed white hat, or leans against the counter doing her lashes before asking you what you want (Personal observations, Beijing sex shops, May and October 2000). As much as the shops themselves, the goods on sale are characterized by caution and conceptual conformity. As we shall now see, Chinese sex aids, in their design and in accounts of themselves in instruction manuals, appeal to biology, medicine, nature, and a mechanical view of the body that reduces sex to the decorticated interaction of body parts (for discussions of the history of biologized sex in China, see Dikötter 1995; Evans 1995: 375–96, 1997). They are presented within a model of assumed marital heterosexuality and within gender norms that have males as active and females passive.

Selling aids to sexual health At the end of the 1990s, sex shops in China sold a full range of over-the-counter supplies for the domestic sexual medicine cabinet. They sold solutions for problems with heterosexual intercourse, for sexually transmitted infections and for not knowing the mechanics of what goes where. Since then, however, other avenues have opened for dealing with some of these issues. Many hospitals have clinics 132 Jo McMillan for treating sexually transmitted infections that accept pseudonyms at registration, and in which, far from moralizing, a weary production line atmosphere prevails (Personal observations, January 2003). The desire for anonymous, non-judgemental care is no longer sufficient reason to prefer self-administered treatment from a sex shop to a hospital clinic. In the last five years, condoms have become widely available in chemists, and it is now less likely that a purchaser will brave the possible embarrassment of going to a sex shop to buy them (Tim Manchester, Country Director of the Futures Group (Europe), a project working with focus groups on user-friendly condom design, interview, January 2003). Sex shops appear to have reacted to competition by scaling down their condom stock, and by July 2002, the Adam and Eve had removed its contraceptive display entirely. By that time too, the Adam and Eve had stopped selling marriage manuals, as they can now easily be bought in high street bookstores. While a few hospitals have male sex clinics, sex shops offer an attractive alternative: cheaper ‘scientific aids’ that can be administered in the privacy of one’s home. Entrepreneurial efforts are now concentrated in those goods where they still have the competitive edge – biomechanical and biochemical fixes for the failed sexual function. The sexual function – and failures in it, the sexual dysfunctions (xing gongneng zhang’ai) – is the globally dominant model for understanding intimate human relations. Masters and Johnson were responsible for the most complete inscrip- tion of desire in physiology, and they are best known for their Human Sexual Response Cycle, which comprises the four phases of excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution. These have entered Chinese as xingfen qi (excitement), pingtai qi (plateau), xing gaochao (orgasm) and xiaotui qi (resolution) (McMillan 2006: 32). Sex shops offer a wide array of products that aim to propel the anatomies participating in heterogenital intercourse through the stages of that cycle. Much of the armoury aims to create enduring erections in men, and induce the desire for sex in women. It is widely presented as a fact of biology – and at times as a minor injustice – that men have been charged with carrying out intercourse and producing orgasms in women who are naturally ‘slower’ in the sexual response. The ‘Real Man Helping Hand’ (Nanzihan zhushou) penile attachments constitute a useful example of a biomechanical fix for lack of female desire. This boxed set of variations on the friction theme includes two attachments to be worn at the base of the penis with fronds of different lengths, and a pair of sheath segments dimpled with nodes of different sizes. The instruction sheet explains at length the natural ease with which men reach orgasm, and compares this to the laborious process by which women arrive at the same destination. It laments that even with ample energies expended on a wife there are still ‘some females who have weak sexual feelings and rather high sexual thresholds’, in which cases, even the strongest of men will need a helping hand. As that assistance is not supposed to be afforded by his partner, coming to his timely rescue are these ciji nüxing (female stimulators), which ‘have been meticulously designed with this need in mind’. The back of the box appeals to the scientific authority of America’s Kinsey Institute whose ‘statistics show that more than 50 per cent of women cannot reach Selling sexual health 133 orgasm when having intercourse if relying solely on stimulation of the vagina, but need the sexual zone (clitoris, labia and so on) to be stroked at the same time’. There is, however, or so the instruction sheet tells the wearer, a natural awkward- ness to sexual choreography. As the instruction sheet explains, ‘sex includes the two stages of foreplay and intercourse. In the foreplay stage, the hand can be used to stroke the sex organs, but when having intercourse, direct manual stimulation is not possible’. Sex is thus divided with military precision into two distinct waves of attack, and for claims about accessibility to be true, intercourse must be conceptualized as some kind of leopard crawl. Here we see a product framed around sex as biology and desire as friction, with assumptions of male activity and marital heterosexuality that reiterate prevalent views about sex and gender. Similarly dutiful in its conceptual underpinnings is the ‘Soaring High Sexual Function Convalescer’ (Tengda xing gongneng huifuqi). It is a penile vacuum pump, a standard element of the global arsenal against erectile dysfunction (along with surgery, intracavernosal injections and prostheses) until being displaced by Viagra. The Convalescer’s instructions suggest it ‘should be used every day in erection training’ and to provide ‘a simulated test (moni shiyan) of intercourse’. The training programme outlined in the manual is in four steps. Step one: the user applies negative pressure that ‘promotes the penis into extending and contracting ... making it big, hard and thick’, and then allows it to go flaccid. Step two requires the introduction of warm water so that ‘the sufferer gets an erection at the same temperature as a vagina’ – the temperature at which it has to perform. Step three involves squeezing and releasing the vacuum pump so that the water circulates. Step four is shifting the vacuum pump to rub the head of the penis, thereby increasing friction. If the device provides a simulation of intercourse, coitus can be understood as little more than penis-in-vagina, where the presence of the man and the woman is only incidental, necessary because it is they who bring the organs to the manoeuvre. In the instructions for this device, wives are called on to play their part as helpful and considerate domestic support. A wife, the manual says, ‘should help her husband use and practise with it, and should become a participant and assistant. She should guard against being a spectator on the sidelines, or someone who just sits and waits. If the wife lies quietly waiting while the husband uses it, he can become flustered ... and when he puts his erect penis into the vagina, he meets with failure again’. Elsewhere, however, the manual advises that the training programme is ‘best practised alone to avoid being disturbed’. This leaves a wife trying to find a way round contradictory instructions. If she helps her husband, she is disturbing his solitary practice, and if she does not, she is being unsupportive. If the user is unsuccessful in establishing with his Soaring High Convalescer what the manufacturers call ‘a new sexual order’, there is at least one party that can be accused of failing to do their bit. While the convalescer instruction manual stays well within acceptable boundaries in its accounts of sex and gender, it gives way to enthusiastic self-promotion. The device will, it says, ‘rouse spirits and rejuvenate, bring pleasure to the old, strength to the weak and transform pain into happiness’. If ‘normal people use it’, 134 Jo McMillan the manual adds, ‘the results are even better’. The reliable erection is invested with life-transforming properties that were once the preserve of proletarian unity – but like the latter, they still have to be striven for. This is just the kind of exaggerated claim that has concerned industry regulators, and why more effective management has been called for. For example, the noted sexologist and CSA member, Shi Chengli, cautions against such hyperbole. As he explains, ‘all vacuum devices for aiding erection have their pros and cons, but none is a miracle cure. They can be beneficial ... but the exaggeration of their effects undoubtedly brings increased psychological pressure on those users for which they have no effect, and leads to lowered confidence in other treatments’ (Shi 2002: 386). Sex shops sell biochemical solutions alongside biomechanical aids for sexual problems, and they do so with appeals to an innocent naturalism. Take, for instance, the Nanlu 888 (literally, male dew) damp towel. It is a wet wipe that delays ejaculation, thus ‘securing semen and nourishing the kidney’, giving ‘endless benefit to your natural health’. Unlike many damp towels, which use local anaesthetics such as Lidocaine, this product is impregnated with ‘pure Chinese medicine’, which the Adam and Eve online catalogue specifies as ‘she chuang zi (cnidium seed), ding xiang (clove), ku shen (flavescent sophora), xi xin (asarum), and others’. The packaging reflects this naturalistic tone, with a large green leaf and a drop of dew catching the sunlight. As the presenter of a Shanghai sex education television programme explained, ‘male dew’ is metaphorical semen, a form of moisture that occurs at night, watering and freshening the female earth, without which she is dry and withered (Zhang Yan, presenter of the programme Source of Life [Shengming zhi yuan], interview, April 2001). The significance of the sequence 888 might simply be to add a string of good luck to the product name (the Chinese for ‘eight’ (ba) rhymes with fa of fa cai (get rich), a fact that makes mobile phone numbers ending in that digit especially desirable and costly). Alternatively, in the numerology of Traditional Chinese Medicine, semen is produced from the age of er ba (two times eight, or sixteen), and ceases at the age of ba ba (eight times eight, or sixty-four) (Fan Minsheng, doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, interview, May 2001). Ba ba ba would then hold out the promise of transforming the user into a sexual Methuselah. Nanlu 888 is unusual in that the validating reputation and statistics are not drawn from the uncomfirmable distance of an overseas organization, but from Professor Yang Wenzhi, urologist and leading member of the CSA. The towel is sold with the CSA seal and a declaration that Yang has used Nanlu 888 on 10 men, and ‘found that the overall effectiveness for delaying ejaculation was 100 per cent’. Here we see an example of the opaque entanglement discussed previously, where a leading member of a body that is regulating the sex shop industry is also personally endorsing one of its products. These are just a few examples of the biomedical interventions available in Chinese sex shops (for a discussion of more, see McMillan 2006). The majority of such shops stay well within the boundaries of the sex-as-health paradigm, selling goods that are presented as medical aids for a fitter sexual function. Selling sexual health 135 They refer to biological need rather than pleasure or desire, and are premised on sex as heterogenital intercourse within marriage. While industry regulators might have cause for concern about counterfeiting, poor production quality and exaggerated claims, in terms of deference to ideological norms, the industry has been remarkably restrained – until recently. Now, commercialism and market pressures are beginning to push medical and social benefit justifications aside. The goods produced by the Wenzhou Lover Health Product Company are a case in point.

Moving away from medicine: manufacturing goods for sexual pleasure A Sino–Japanese joint venture, the Wenzhou Lover Health Product Company began operations in the early 1990s, and is now the largest sex goods manufacturer in China, the third largest in Asia and the tenth largest in the world (Li Yanping, company representative, interview, December 2002). It is the only sex goods company in China with an export licence, obtained in 1998. Business was boosted when an e-commerce website (www.chinasextoys.net) was established in 2001, and sales were up 1,200 per cent that year, half of the total accounted for by exports (Walsh 2002: 39). ‘Our goal’ the website confidently declares ‘is to increase cooperation with the top companies in our profession ... and we are currently striving toward product diversification and enterprise internationalization!’ Foreign trade contacts make regular visits, and according to Li Yanping, the British high street sex shop chain, Ann Summers, places two very large orders every year. Some of the company’s goods are destined for both the domestic and export markets, but are given different constructions for each. Their vibrators in China, for instance, still come with manuals that describe them as ‘health consolation machines’ (jianweiqi), which act by increasing blood flow and stimulating the nervous system. In UK outlets such as Ann Summers, by contrast, they are packaged as fun sexual accessories for the pleasure-seeking young, with instructions that go little beyond correct insertion of the batteries (McMillan 2006: 41–3). In the Wenzhou Company showroom, nine inflatable dolls were suspended against the back wall, their arms outstretched in unfulfilled embrace. The air had leaked from some of them, and their necks were limp as if swinging from the gallows. Five of them had plastic bags over their heads. Vice Manager, Kang Shaokui, took one down and pinched her right nipple. ‘It’s soft’ he said. ‘Try it’. I reached out and squeezed the left one. ‘Only our company produces soft nipples!’ Li Yanping said with pride. The yielding nipple innovation was, apparently, in response to customer demand. Most product development, however, is target driven, and the company’s team of 64 designers is charged with thinking up two innovations every week. With the help of its Japanese partner, the Wenzhou Company is developing specialized products to fill new niches. ‘Works-in-progress include a “lovebot”, a humanoid doll with life-like skin that will be able to move and speak lines such as “Am I going too fast for you?”’ (Walsh 2002: 39). 136 Jo McMillan Wu Wei, company president, claims that competitors in Hong Kong and Taiwan are so worried by his Research and Development programme that they have tried to steal ideas by sending industrial spies posing as foreign journalists to his factory (ibid.). The company catalogue is a 178-page portfolio of the design team’s ingenuity, with 122 different types of vibrator alone (not including variations in colour). It also has a number of goods, the medical benefits of which would be difficult to frame – though these have yet to find a way onto the domestic market. Such items include replica explosives entitled ‘Howitzer nine-inch’ and ‘Grenade five-inch’ under the rubric ‘Anal Assault’, and a blow-up Friesian called ‘Big Bertha Inflatable Love Cow’. While only a few years ago sex aids came in bland boxes, the Wenzhou Lover Health Product Company is now adorning its goods with photos of naked models. These are bought under contract, an established arrangement that would appear to flout the 1990 prohibition on toys printed with pornographic pictures (see Zhongguo xing kexue baike quanshu 1998: 500–1). And while in the past, sex aids carried little more wording than a delicate name such as ‘Love Partner’, the Wenzhou products are covered in sexual slogans in English. The company employs an American to compose them, and although the language is faultless for export goods, haphazard strings of obscenities seem to be regarded as sufficient for creating a ‘foreign import feel’ for the domestic market. One of their standard vibrators, which I bought in the Adam and Eve, has this on the packet: ‘Vibrating panty! ... Brazilian cut harness with Lycra panty has fully adjustable straps for the perfect fit and is removable for easy cleaning ... High quality micro-chip developed in the Silicon Valley powers this unique pulsating and vibrating unit with micro egg ... I Want You Inside Me Deeply By You Hot Cock!!’(sic). A medicalized, socially aware – and, I discovered, brittle – veneer remains on the Wenzhou Company’s operations. Vibrators and other sex aids are ‘a tool for social stability’, the company president claims, ‘something that could help teenagers who want to experiment with sex, cut down on STDs, help stop couples from divorcing [and] reduce the number of rapists’ (Walsh 2002: 39). His deputy, Kang Shaokui, had the same message. ‘These are medical devices’ he told me. They are subject to ‘clinical tests’ carried out ‘in hospitals’. They are tested on ‘people of the appropriate age, sex and physical condition’. The instruction manual of one of their vibrators claims as much, stating that such products ‘undergo repeated clinical tests on more than 100 people with disturbance to the sexual function at two large hospitals in Zhejiang Province’. Really? I asked. Well ... no, admitted Kang Shaokui. ‘What happens is, one month we have one person testing them, the next month another person, and so on’. The Wenzhou Lover Health Product Company is a demonstration of how commercial pressures and the potential to make large amounts of money are weakening deference to the medical model. Science and health are giving way to preference and pleasure, and sex toys instead of sex aids are starting to stream off the production line. With medicine and existing moral justifications under threat, new rationalizations are being sought for what the market is demanding. Still required to serve a public purpose, sex goods are now being harnessed to the idea of progress, to a model of a mythologized ‘West’ and to the logic of Selling sexual health 137 the market itself. It is a very pragmatic approach, one that minimizes resistance by attaching existing and accepted values to new practices. For evidence, we can go back to the Guangdong Adult Goods Market and look at one of its latest arrivals.

Conclusion In the stall by the main door of the Guangdong Adult Goods Market there is a stack of boxes with the kind of contraption you might use to walk a dog: a fabric loop attached to a long metal chain, and at the other end, a studded leather band and yellow ball. The young shop assistant slides over to me in his plastic slippers. I ask him what the contraption is for. ‘You wear it’, he says. Wear it where? ‘I don’t know’, he replies, and slides off again. He comes back with a brochure for the Red Spider Appealing Leather Adornment Design Centre, a company set up in September 2002. The brochure has 28 photographs of white-skinned women and 17 pictures of female mannequins in leather corsetry or tied up in rope-like harnesses. It also has pictures of handcuffs, studded collars, masks, whips and ball gags. ‘As the material and cultural level of the masses is constantly being raised’, the brochure explains, ‘the demand for personal adornment (fushi) ... becomes more individualized’. It becomes ‘a form of culture’. This ‘appealing adornment’ (qingqu fushi), otherwise known as ‘sexy adornment’ (xinggan fushi) is a mark of progress of ‘human civilization’. In doing so, the brochure for the Red Spider Appealing Leather Adornment Design Centre presents the company as propelling China forward in the race to catch up with the ‘developed countries of Europe and America’ where ‘the market for this kind of product is already extremely mature’. And if there were any doubt that in ‘developed Western countries’ restraining women in bondage gear is anything other than everyday, the brochure tells us to witness the ‘Western films ... especially a number of Hollywood films where appealing (sexy) dance clothes are a common occurrence’. Thus, mainstream American blockbusters are generalized as documentary evidence of Western sexual practice. The brochure goes on to describe post-WTO China as ‘the world’s factory’, and what the company is doing is ‘making the most of our country’s ample natural resources and superiority in labour resources’ to cater to the needs of customers at home and abroad. In short, what the market wants the market gets. Over the decade since China’s first sex shop opened, the industry has fashioned itself within the biomedical paradigm and self-managed to the point that there has been little for the industry regulators to worry about other than low standards and wild claims in the cause of profiteering. Now, however, more fundamental ideological tensions are arising. Goods are being produced that seem to have little to do with repairs to the sexual body. Sex is being decoupled from need, instinct and health, and biomedicine, in this industry at least, is in retreat. Entrepreneurs are expanding into products whose medical uses are tenuous at best, and have more clearly to do with pleasure, preference, play and power. The sex shop industry is now a site where sexual morality is being reworked, and the meaning of ‘sex’ itself is being contested. 138 Jo McMillan Note 1 This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wenzhou between 1997 and 2003. Research draws on observations in around thirty sex shops, interviews with entrepreneurs and professionals in the sexology field, and an analysis of a range of sex shop products. Elements of the material have previously appeared in Sex, Science and Morality in China (McMillan 2006). Two chapters of that text provide a detailed discussion of sex-as-biological imperative and the treatments for dysfunction currently available in Chinese sex shops and clinics.

References Blass, A. (1993) ‘Goodbye to prudery: state-run sex shop offers range of devices and elixirs’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 6 May, 156: 34–5. Becker, J. (2000) The Chinese, London: John Murray. China Statistical Yearbook (2002) Beijing: China Statistics Press. Dikötter, F. (1995) Sex, Culture and Modernity in China, London: Hurst. ‘Dirty advertisement’ (2001) Beijing Review, 4 October, 40: 22–4. Evans, H. (1995) ‘Defining difference: the “scientific” construction of female sexuality and gender in the People’s Republic of China’ SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 20, 2: 357–96. Evans, H. (1997) Women and Sexuality in China, Cambridge: Polity Press. ‘Experts call for plan to control sex shops’ (1999) China Daily, 6 January, online edition. ‘Faking it?’ (2001) That’s Shanghai, March: 10. Fang Chungeng (2003) ‘Xing’ai geming yinling haishi wudao? [Is it misguided to look forward to the sexual revolution?], Ren zhi chu 1: 2. Farrer, J. (2002) Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘First sex center opens’ (1993) Beijing Review, 1–7 March, 36: 7–8. Gao Dewei (1998) Doukou nianhua yu xing [The Early Teenage Girl and Sex], Shenzhen: Haitian chubanshe. Lusby, J. (2002) ‘Sex sells’, City Weekend online edition, 18 December 2002. McMillan, J. (2006) Sex, Science and Morality in China, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Panzer, R. (2000a) ‘Biyuntao zhi guo’ [Condom nation], Zhongguo xing kexue, 9, 2: 29–43. Panzer, R. (2000b) ‘Biyuntao zhi guo’ [Condom nation], Zhongguo xing kexue, 9, 3: 29–40. Shi Chengli (2002) Xing jiankang zixun wenda [Questions and Answers in Sexual Health Advice], Guangzhou: Guangdong lüyou chubanshe. The Editor (2002) ‘After centuries of “love enhancing” drugs the Chinese find something that really works’, The Guardian, 11 May: 16. Walsh, B. (2002) ‘XXX factor’ Time Magazine, 27 May: 39. Wu Zongxian (2000) ‘Zhongguo falü zhong de seqing yinhui guiding’ [Provisions on pornography and obscenity in Chinese legislation], Zhongguo xing kexue [Chinese Sexology] 9/4: 1–4. Zhongguo jingji falü quanshu [Chinese Encyclopaedia of Economic Law] (1998) Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe. Zhongguo xing kexue baike quanshu [Chinese Encyclopaedia of Sexology] (1998) Beijing: Zhongguo da baike quanshu chubanshe. 7 Female sex sellers and public policy in the People’s Republic of China

Zhang Heqing

Introduction The subject of prostitution, and the appropriate nature of its regulation, is a new but increasing focus of research by scholars in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Two of the most noted scholars in this respect are Pan Suiming (1997, 1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2004), from the People’s University of China in Beijing, and Li Yinhe (see Ai and Li 2001; Li Yinhe 2005), from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. With the aim of contributing to this growing body of research, between October 2000 and May 2003, I undertook case studies of female sexual service providers (xingfuwuzhe) in the Chinese province of Yunnan, a province that shares its borders with Laos, Myanmar, Tibet and Vietnam (Zhang 2002).1 The research took place in a number of locations, which, due to the fact that the selling and buying of sex (maiyinpiaochang) is prohibited in the PRC, will not be referred to by their proper names. These locations are: (1) City A; (2) City B, a border city noted for its commerce and tourism; (3) District C, a border tourist area; and (4) City D, an open border city at county level. I basically concur with Li Yinhe, who argues that the current policy of banning prostitution in China is incorrect and supports a policy of decriminalization for three reasons (Ai and Li 2001). The first reason why Li Yinhe supports a policy of decriminalization is because prohibition does not work. As she points out, there is not a single international example of a successful prohibitionist policy. Prohibitionist policies also entail certain unwanted outcomes such as police corruption and organized crime (ibid.). Moreover, as Pan Suiming (1998b) has noted, in order to avoid apprehension by the police, female prostitutes (jinü) have no choice other than to become embroiled in the exploitative networks of the prostitution industry. Prohibition is therefore not in the interests of female prostitutes because it prevents them from being self-employed. The second reason why Li Yinhe supports the decriminalization of prostitution is because it is difficult to distinguish between prostitution and the relationships of economic dependency that occur between men and women in marriage (Ai and Li 2001). To paraphrase her argument, generally speaking, there are three roles available to women. The first is to be a prostitute: this is a relationship that involves financial exchange but not marriage. The second is to be a mistress: this is a 140 Zhang Heqing relationship that involves neither financial exchange nor marriage, but is still one of economic dependency. The third is to be a wife: this is a relationship that entails marriage and no financial exchange, yet some married women have no resources of their own and are therefore completely dependent on men for their livelihood. There is no fundamental difference between these three roles; the difference between these three types of economic relationships is strictly quantitative not qualitative in nature. Hence, if we do not penalize the relations of economic dependency that occur in marriage – and we clearly cannot – then there is no reason to maintain that providers of sexual services are criminals. The third reason why Li Yinhe supports a policy of decriminalization is because there is a fundamental difference between decriminalizing and legalizing prostitution. Legalization is about having open and licensed brothels, i.e. it is about the state regulation of licensed commercial services. Decriminalization simply means that sexual relationships between consenting adults should not be punishable by law, even if those relationships are characterized by financial exchange (ibid.). In short, decriminalization involves continued government controls over the organization and facilitation of prostitution practices and businesses, whilst removing government restrictions on the exchange of sex for money between consenting adults (for an account of the differences between decriminalization, legalization and criminalization, see Jeffreys 2004: 70–95). Li Yinhe’s views on decriminalization and the problems associated with the current policy of banning prostitution in the PRC have informed my research on female sexual service providers in Yunnan Province. The actions taken with regard to the current policy of attacking prostitution, pornography and illegality in China (saohuang dafei), have been enormous in scale and scope, giving rise to regular if periodic campaigns to ‘strike hard’ (yanda) against prostitution businesses and practices. Yet the reality is that the more we battle against prostitution the more prostitution there is. There is a clear discrepancy here between policy goals and the effects of their implementation. The broader existence of such discrepancies has produced a frequent complaint, ‘there are policies above, and below there are countermeasures’ (shang you zhengce, xia you duice), which affects the credibility and efficacy of public policies. In certain policy situations, these discrepancies cannot be resolved by human effort. However, in the case of prostitution, they can and should be overcome by revising the policy of banning commercial sex between consenting adults. This chapter highlights the inefficacy of China’s current prostitution controls and points to the utility of a policy of decriminalization in terms of ameliorating the exploitation experienced by many women in prostitution. To do so, it focuses on three areas of pressure that are faced by female sexual service providers under the policy of banning the selling and buying of sex in China, namely, rights, wealth and health. The Yunnan case studies are therefore organized around three broad questions. What kinds of power relations and counter tactics exist under the current policy of banning prostitution, pornography and illegality? Who profits most from the economic exchange involved in the prostitution transaction? Given that the current policy of attacking prostitution functions to conceal the spread of Female sex sellers and public policy 141 HIV/AIDS, what are the consequences of this concealment in terms of the health of female sexual service providers, those who hire their services, and the broader social networks of both sellers and buyers of sex? To address these questions, I have adopted a qualitative rather than quantitative approach. It is easy to make essentialist and universalizing comments about complex and variegated social phenomena, and then proceed to define those phenomenon and their objects. For example, if we define sexual service work as an evil social phenomenon, then in terms of policy it becomes uniformly viewed as a ‘crime’ and something that should be struggled against. This reductive binary opposition of ‘legal/illegal’ not only influences the aims and efficacy of policy, but also functions to further stigmatize female sexual service providers. Their conduct is labelled as ‘overstepping the bounds of propriety’ and, consequently, as something that should be punished. In practice, however, the relationships surrounding the provision of sexual services are highly complex. Under prohibitive policies, many women end up being the scapegoats of people with power, such as brothel keepers and people with connections. Hence, it is necessary to pay attention to the voices of weaker groups within the banned and condemned sexual service industry, especially those who are subject to exploitation and the threat of HIV/AIDS. Last, but not least, this research is informed by the concerns of social work in that it aims to promote public knowledge of the circumstances faced by disadvantaged groups such as female sexual service providers, and help relevant government authorities to realize the limitations of existing prostitution policies. Achieving the latter task will not be easy, but, on this point, I also concur with Li Yinhe. As Harriet Evans (Ai Hua) said to Li Yinhe: ‘While it is obviously impossible to decriminalize prostitution [in China] overnight, do you think it is possible at all? Where and how would you start?’ Li Yinhe replied, ‘In terms of time, I am not very optimistic. Who knows? It may take five or ten years. But I think now is the time to start explaining the necessity of decriminalizing prostitution to the Chinese public, the media and academia’ (Ai and Li 2001). She concluded by noting that most policy changes start with reasoning, analysing the status quo, searching for solutions and then gradually coming to a common understanding before any changes can be made. In other words, any changes in policy or law require a large amount of academic and policy research, and this chapter is written with the aim of contributing to this task.

The history of prostitution in the PRC The inequitable and inappropriate nature of the current policy of banning the selling and buying of sex in the PRC can be illustrated with reference to the case studies I conducted in Yunnan Province between October 2000 and June 2001. During this period, I witnessed the campaign cycle of ‘striking hard’ against prostitution, a process wherein media exposure of government efforts to crackdown on prostitution is accompanied by police raids and suppression of prostitution activities, followed by media reports of campaign successes, and then a gradual 142 Zhang Heqing return to the status quo. In the following sections of this chapter, I will discuss this particular campaign cycle, the kinds of power relations it entailed, and the kinds of countermeasures it evoked. Before doing so, however, it is useful to offer a brief historical overview of the PRC’s response to the selling and buying of sex. Following its accession to political power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced to the world that it would resolutely eliminate the system of prostitution in China. Consequently, on 21 November 1949, all the brothels in Beijing were closed down during the course of one evening (‘Duanping jiefang jinü’: 1). Over the next few years, the newly established People’s Republic eradicated the several-thousand-year-old system of prostitution in China. When, for a diverse range of reasons, prostitution reappeared on the mainland during the late 1970s to early 1980s, the Chinese government reiterated its previous prohibitionist stance: the selling and buying of sex is not to be tolerated in China and is something that should be fought against. Consequently, on 15 August 1981, the Eleventh meeting of the Standing Committee of the Fifth Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress passed the Provincial Provisional Rules on Banning Selling and Buying of Sex (see Cai 1999: 417). Following the introduction of this ruling, all the other provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in China proceeded to produce their own localized version of the Guangdong regulations. The initial aim was to eradicate prostitution from the mainland once again. The desired goal of eradicating prostitution from economic reform China (December 1978–present) led to the promulgation of various laws and regulations. In 1990, the National People’s Congress passed the Decisions on the Punishment of Crimes of Smuggling, Manufacturing, Trading, and Disseminating Obscene Products (ibid.). These regulations state that those who engage in the smuggling, manufacturing, trading and dissemination of obscene books, journals, films, videos, audiotapes, pictures, or any other obscene products, shall be severely punished. In 1991, the National People’s Congress promulgated the Decision on Strictly Forbidding the Selling and Buying of Sex (hereafter the 1991 Decision), which specifies the PRC’s policy rules on eradicating prostitution (Quanguo renda changweihui et al. 1991). The introductory preamble to this Decision states that supplementary amendments have been made to the 1979 Criminal Law in order to punish severely those people who organize, force, induce, shelter and facilitate prostitution activities. Concurrently, in 1993, the State Council promulgated the Rules Regarding the Detention and Education of People Who Sell and Buy Sex (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan 1993). This policy was made in accordance with the previously mentioned 1991 Decision on banning the selling and buying of sex. It aims to educate and redeem prostitution offenders and also to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Reaffirming the prohibitory goals of the 1991 Decision, the PRC’s revised Criminal Law of 1997 states that it is a crime to organize, coerce, induce, shelter or facilitate prostitution activities. In other words, the Chinese Government considers the organization of the selling and buying of sex to be a crime. In 1997, the Disciplinary Rules of the Chinese Communist Party specified that Party Female sex sellers and public policy 143 members who engaged in the selling and buying of sex would be subjected to severe punishment (‘Communist Party discipline regulations’ 1997). Governmental efforts to ban prostitution practices and businesses were also reinforced in 1999, when the State Council issued the Regulations Concerning the Management of Public Places of Entertainment (hereafter the Entertainment Regulations) (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan 1999). As this brief historical overview suggests, banning prostitution is an important state policy in China. The attitude of both the CCP and the Chinese Government is to eliminate prostitution according to law. Hence, every part of China has had a campaign against prostitution businesses and practices; and government employees and Party members are extremely reluctant to challenge this policy publicly. In view of the Party and governmental stance on prostitution, the implementation of continuous crackdowns on prostitution by law-enforcement authorities such as the Public Security Bureau, and frequent media condemnation and exposure of prostitution activities, one might have assumed that the practice of selling and buying sex would have disappeared from China once again. But the reality is not so simple, as the next section of this chapter shows.

The temporary efficacy of campaigns to ‘strike hard’ against commercial sex Despite the implementation of ongoing campaigns to ‘strike hard’ against prostitution, incomplete statistics released by the Chinese Public Security Bureau suggest that the selling and buying of sex is increasing. In 1987, for example, the Chinese police apprehended and investigated 68,091 people for involvement in prostitution activities. In 1988, they apprehended and investigated 115,000 people, and, in 1990, they apprehended and investigated a further 137,000 people. This figure rose to 200,000 people in 1991; 240,000 in 1992, 250,000 in 1993; 270,000 in 1994; 360,000 in 1995; 427,000 in 1996, and 432,000 people in 1997 (Pan 1998a: 7). Indeed, Pan Suiming estimated that there were approximately 2.1 million female sellers of sex in China between the late 1980s and the late 1990s (ibid.). Given the proliferating nature of commercial sexual activities in present-day China, it is important to consider the effects of continuing to implement prohibitive policies. As Chen Chengwen (2000) and Xiong Bingchun (2001) variously point out, in a period of great social change, the most affected and worst harmed members of society are those who belong to marginalized groups. Their unfortunate experiences are often rationalized by focusing blame on the individuals concerned. They are said to be of poor quality, psychologically weak, and lacking survival skills and the desire to improve themselves. In short, it is suggested that they only have themselves to blame for their circumstances. As a result, few people realize what difficulties are faced by members of marginalized groups such as female sellers of sex, the struggles they have to undertake, and the often remarkable initiatives, resilience and tenacity that they display in the process of undertaking such struggles. 144 Zhang Heqing The difficulties that ‘strike hard’ campaigns against prostitution place on female sellers of sex in the PRC, and the countermeasures they evoke, can be illustrated with reference to a campaign to enforce the 1999 Entertainment Regulations in Yunnan Province. To elaborate, on 16 October 2000, the Chinese media reported that the respective nightclubs of a five-star and three-star hotel in City A of Yunnan Province were providing commercial sex services, and that several organizers of prostitution, as well as female sellers of sex, were openly competing with each other to peddle sexual services to their customers. These activities were caught on television camera. Media commentators insisted that such blatant conduct was unheard of, particularly in an environment where the central government has consistently reiterated its policy of banning prostitution, gambling and drugs. They expressed surprise that City A not only dared to let such activities occur in an open fashion, but also did so in star-grade hotels. The result was that relevant governmental departments held an emergency meeting to plan and implement an immediate campaign to ‘strike hard’ against the sex industry and other illegal activities in City A and Yunnan Province more generally. Although it was not possible for me to discover the precise details of how this particular campaign was coordinated and implemented, I subsequently followed and recorded detailed observations of the activities that occurred within several nightclubs, sauna and fitness clubs, and so-called ‘red-light districts’, in City A and other parts of Yunnan Province. This research demonstrates that despite the seeming toughness of measures to eradicate prostitution, such measures are often ineffective in practice, particularly in the long term. While the tough implementation of policy seems to demonstrate the capacity of government by eliminating prostitution activities overnight, my studies reveal that this semblance of eradication is frequently a false impression created by ‘people below’ for the benefit of ‘inspectors from above’. For example, on 19 October 2000, a few days after the media exposure of prostitution activities in City A, a colleague and I went to visit a new residential area and village on the shore of the Dragon River in City A. This area had numerous salons offering foot washing and massage services, namely, services that are a known front for prostitution activities in China. Of the 30 or more salons in this particular area, one had its iron door half opened; two had their windows open. The doors and windows of the remainder were all closed. On the closed doors of most of these salons were signs that read: ‘shop for lease or sale, please ring or page XXX’. The usual incessant stream of cars and people had vanished. Instead, there were police officers patrolling the street both on foot and in cars. Around 10 p.m. that same evening, we went to the Lijin nightclub in City A, which was normally very busy. Local people claim that the village head established this nightclub, which means it would have the protection of local officials. That night, however, the usual noise of people singing and flirting was absent from this particular nightclub. As soon as we entered, a staff member came over. I pointed at certain rooms – i.e. small rooms within karaoke/dance venues that are a known front for prostitution activities in China – and asked what they were for. She replied that they were offices. I then asked why there were no xiaojie or Female sex sellers and public policy 145 ‘working girls’ in the club.2 ‘What girls?’ she replied in a serious tone. ‘I have never heard of such a thing’. After a short period of time, however, another woman came over and said in a much warmer tone: ‘Come and have fun next time. There are no girls here today’. When I asked why this was the case, she said: ‘haven’t you heard what happened at those star-grade hotels? The situation is a bit tense at the moment, so I have sent my girls home. I have to be responsible for both you and my girls. You should have fun, but you should also feel safe, shouldn’t you? Come back in three days time, OK?’ Female sexual service providers later identified this particular woman as a highly capable madam or organizer of prostitution activities (some said she was a transvestite), who reputedly had more than 100 women working for her. If each woman gave her 10 yuan per evening, she would have earned 20,000 to 30,000 yuan a month. This is a considerable sum, given that the average monthly wage in Yunnan Province during 2001 was 600 yuan (Zhongguo tongji nianbao 2001). Moreover, her injunction for us to return in three days time suggests that commercial sexual activities had only disappeared on a temporary basis from this particular nightclub. Around 9 p.m. one evening, approximately one week after the media exposure of commercial sexual activities in City A and the ensuing crackdown on such activities, my colleague and I visited two new suburbs of that city known as ‘the pleasure park of head and foot massage’, namely, an area that was known for the existence of prostitution activities. The shops in this area had names like ‘Northeast Girl Foot-soaking Salon’ and ‘Flower-fairy Hair Washing Salon’. They were all closed with signs on the doors saying ‘shop for lease or sale, please ring or page XXX’. On the spur of the moment, I decided to call the ‘Flower-fairy’. The resulting conversation proceeded as follows. Researcher: ‘Hello! Is that Flower-fairy salon? Are you open or not?’Woman: ‘Yes, we are open. Which girl are you looking for? If you would like to have your feet washed and massaged, please come to the shop and I will let you in’. Researcher: ‘Is it safe?’ Woman: ‘Yes ... but, if you tell me which girl you prefer, then you could pick her up and take her away’. Researcher: ‘I thought the shop was for lease or sale?’Woman: ‘Oh ... it is more than 100,000 yuan’. This conversation suggests, once again, that prostitution-related business activities had not exactly been eradicated from this particular area. My colleague and I then walked down another street and came across the well-known Maple Leaf nightclub. There were a lot of male customers wandering around outside the premises. Some of them could be heard complaining: ‘the girls have disappeared! This is all the fault of the TV stations’. However, two women who looked like sex sellers approached my colleague and I and offered to accompany us to another place if we wanted to have fun. They suggested that we could go to the People’s Dance Hall, saying that it was safe there. We declined with excuses. However, as this example further suggests, the campaign may have halted the facilitation of commercial sexual activities in the Maple Leaf and other nightclubs, but such services were still available. On 25 October 2000, approximately 10 days after the media exposure of commercial sexual activities in City A, my colleague and I went to the Ocean 146 Zhang Heqing Sauna and Fitness Centre, which was located within a government guesthouse and hence rumored to have good connections and local government protection. It was a luxurious place, providing high quality services. By all accounts, it was normally crowded with customers, even during the daytime, and had 100 girls working three shifts a day. But when we went to the Centre, there were hardly any customers around. We asked if there were any girls available. The supervisor nervously replied: ‘We have never had any “girls” here’ (he thought we were plain-clothes police officers). When we asked who provided massages if the centre did not have any ‘girls’, he told us in a stony-faced manner that the Centre had excellent professional masseuses. The masseuses we saw were all wearing white gowns like doctors. When we asked one of these women whether or not she offered special services (i.e. sex-related services), she replied: ‘we don’t know what special services are: we only know how to massage’. My colleague and I attempted to find out more by saying that we were regular customers. She then told us that the police had been to check the Centre on several occasions, and had been that very morning. In the end, we asked her if she would offer ‘special services’ if we gave her extra money. She said that she would not, at least not in the confines of the Centre. We subsequently excused ourselves and left. In sum, the late 2000 campaign to strike hard against prostitution activities in City A appeared to have achieved some success in limiting the facilitation of commercial sexual activities within places of leisure and entertainment, even though it had not succeeded in eradicating prostitution activities completely. This particular campaign lasted for three months and, for a short duration of time, it seemed that all nightlife in the city had ended. From mid October to December 2000, nearly all the hair salons in City A and the surrounding areas were closed. Most of the sauna and fitness centres stopped operating while they reorganized their facilities in keeping with the regulations outlined in the 1999 Entertainment Regulations. There were no ‘girls’ to be found in nightclubs, unless they were wearing staff uniforms and going under the new title of waitresses, DJs or bar staff. Furthermore, the small rooms within karaoke/dance venues where prostitution activities are known to occur had been either dismantled or boarded up. This outward appearance of ‘campaign successes’ was confirmed by trips to other locations in City A. On 6 December 2000, for example, I went to Baiyun Road in City A, an area where several hair-washing salons had already reopened for business. Seven or eight girls sat in each salon, waiting for the arrival of customers. I stood outside of these salons for more than 40 minutes, but no customers came. The women may have returned to work, but their clients had not yet resumed their previous practices. In nearby ‘X’ village, the situation was similar. Of 20 hair-washing salons, only one was open and there were no customers. However, later that same day, my colleague and I went to the Lijin nightclub, which we had first visited on 19 October 2000. We met the same madam who we had met on our original visit. She had about 20 girls to recommend to customers for their personal selection. The girls no longer went by the title ‘xiaojie’, they were now referred to as DJs, waitresses, or people who sold beverages. There were also approximately 20 male customers inside the venue. While acknowledging that Female sex sellers and public policy 147 she had experienced some setbacks as a result of the three-month long campaign to enforce the Entertainment Regulations and ‘strike hard’ against prostitution and illegality, this particular madam suggested that things would soon be back to normal. Quoting a popular line from traditional Chinese poetry, she said: ‘Wild fire cannot exterminate plains of grass, new seeds will start to grow again in the springtime’. As it turns out, the madam’s suggestion that the effects of the campaign to strike hard against commercial sexual activities in City A would be short-lived proved to be accurate. In February 2001, four months after our initial visit, my colleague and I returned to the Lijin nightclub for the third time. This time we encountered a completely different scene. The same madam greeted us warmly. She brought 12 girls over and said teasingly that they were the ‘sweet type’, the ‘open type’, and that she had all kinds of girls for us to choose from. When we attempted to excuse ourselves by saying that none of the girls were suitable, she led us into the very same room that she had previously described as an office. This room was about 40 square metres and there were around 60 girls waiting in there. All in all, there were approximately 100 girls working in the nightclub that evening. While we were at the Lijin nightclub, we encountered a ‘working girl’ named Yang, whom we had met on a previous occasion at another venue. Ms Yang explained that she had left the nightclub when the campaign to ‘strike hard’ against commercial sexual activities had commenced. She had gone to work in a high-grade bar instead. She told us that the bar had approximately 20 girls who wore sexy clothes, and that drank and chatted with the customers. It also had female dancers. However, the bar had no concealed rooms for illicit sexual activities. All activities within the bar were open and conducted in public. Hence the bar had continued to operate during the campaign period. Now the campaign had more or less finished, Ms Yang had returned to work at the Lijin nightclub. As she explained, most ‘working girls’ find a place to hide or else work in a different guise during the ‘strike hard’ period. The temporary efficacy of campaigns to ‘strike hard’ against commercial sexual activities in City A can be further demonstrated with reference to the example of the Ocean Sauna and Fitness Centre. Later that same evening in February 2001, my colleague and I went to the Ocean Sauna and Fitness Centre, a venue that we had first visited on 25 October 2000. Contrary to the original contention that the Centre offered no special services, we were informed that the Centre provided a service known as ‘tuiyou’ or a massage with oil. This service entails a complete body massage, including massage of the penis, performed with the hands and/or breasts and using baby oil. The Centre had lots of customers and there were about 50 girls working three different shifts. Thus, for many operators of venues providing commercial sexual activities, the effects of the campaign in City A were short-lived. To summarize the preceding remarks, campaigns to ‘strike hard’ against prostitution in China are not effective and do not appear to overly concern the organizers and facilitators of the prostitution industry. Instead, they tend to further 148 Zhang Heqing disadvantage the already marginalized and exploited prostitute subject. Moreover, they hinder the task of disease prevention.

Prostitution equals hard work, not ‘easy money’ Most people in China support ‘strike hard’ campaigns against prostitution, including the forced detention and re-education of female sex sellers, because they think that prostitutes are the primary beneficiaries of the provision of commercial sexual activities. This understanding is highlighted by the following commonplace yet disparaging remarks about women in prostitution. ‘These people earn money lying on their back, who can compete with them?’ ‘They take in money at both ends; they profit without any effort’. Whilst not denying that some women profit from their involvement in the sex industry, the more important questions to ask are: ‘How do women in prostitution make their money and at what cost? And, is sex work really as simple as the above-mentioned remarks suggest? The sad reality is that the majority of female sexual service providers have to endure economic hardship and social prejudice; and this hardship is compounded by the fact that they are often forced to seek protection from third parties in order to evade apprehension from the Chinese police. For example, I conduced an in-depth interview with Chen Yu, a woman in City A. When I first met Chen Yu at the Lijin nightclub, I thought she was around 20 years old. Later on, when I got to know her better and had seen her ID card, I found out that she was actually 30 years old and had a ten-year-old daughter. Chen came from a rural area of Sichuan and had come to City A to sell sexual services in order to support her family. She was very confident and kept her psychological balance by asserting that she was earning money through her labour: she was not stealing or robbing other people. Chen Yu had divorced due to family violence. Her husband was a drunkard at the time they got married. But, following the birth of their daughter, he became addicted to drugs. Chen’s husband would often beat her and take things from home to sell when he was running out of money for drugs. After their divorce, Chen left her three-year-old daughter with her parents and starting working in the Lijin nightclub, or else on call at other venues in City A, to support her family. According to Chen Yu, she was often insulted and threatened by clients imme- diately after she had provided them with sexual services, a practice which really upset her. Rich customers would sometimes throw money at her and abuse her verbally. Once, a customer of the nightclub refused to pay her saying: ‘Me! Pay you a tip? Your boss invited me here. You had better be careful. Otherwise I will make sure not only that you get in trouble, but also that the nightclub loses its licence and ceases business’. Chen said she was so scared that she let him go. She told me that she endured such experiences at least once or twice a month. I asked Chen Yu whether or not she was worried about the current campaign against prostitution. She replied that she was very concerned because, as a native of Sichuan, she had no real connections in Yunnan Province. She could only rely on the help of her lover (I suspect she was the mistress of someone with some Female sex sellers and public policy 149 connections), the nightclub boss, and the madam. When I asked about her relationship with the boss and madam, she implied that she had little alternative other than to rely on their help and protection. As she put it: ‘It’s OK. It is not easy to do business. Our relationship turns on money’. Over the course of several interviews with Chen Yu, the thing that left the deepest impression on me was a talk we had about sexually transmissible infections (STIs), including HIV/AIDS. I asked Chen Yu whether or not she had heard of AIDS. She jokingly replied, ‘do you mean the “loving to death” disease?’ (the Chinese characters for AIDS (aizibing) sound similar phonetically to the characters for love and death). When I asked her to be serious, she said she knew very little and asked me to provide more information. During the course of my explanation of the causes of STIs and their paths of transmission, she became increasingly nervous and agitated. At the next interview, she looked happy and told me that she had gone to the hospital for a check-up the day after I explained the risk of STIs and HIV/AIDS to her. She was happy the whole evening because her results were negative. In terms of her negative test results for STIs and HIV/AIDS, Chen Yu was one of the more fortunate women I interviewed. In City B, for instance, I met a number of female sexual service providers who had entered China from bordering countries through Mr Nai, a non-native of China, aged approximately 50, who had lived in that city for many years. The woman I spoke to most was called Neinei. She said she liked working in China because she could make more money than she could in her home country. As a dressmaker in her home country, Neinei could make 4 yuan a day, whereas she could make 200 to 300 yuan selling sex on a good day in China, and at least 100 yuan on a bad day. Her asking price on the street was 30 yuan for a first-time customer, but she would accept 10 yuan if a client became a regular and went back to her accommodation. Neinei told me that she sent money home to her father and sister and was looking forward to going home in an estimated two months time because she missed her family and was afraid of acquiring HIV/AIDS. According to Mr Nai, foreign women who sold sex in Yunnan Province were forced to do so because of economic hardship and to support their families, but the majority of these women were afflicted with STIs and other diseases. Some had acute eczema and thought that using condoms caused this and therefore refused to use them. Others suffered from syphilis and tried to cure themselves by placing burning cigars on their private parts. Mr Nai added that HIV/AIDS was a serious problem amongst this particular group of women, stating that three of the women I had interviewed were HIV positive, and of the 10 women who worked for Neinei’s boss, eight of them had HIV/AIDS. Sadly, as I discovered later, Neinei also subsequently contracted HIV/AIDS. As Mr Nai explained, Neinei had consistently provided oral and vaginal sex without using condoms. Almost all of these women had entered China from other countries to engage in sex work as a result of poverty. In the evening near Daqingshu Public Park, particularly near the Yeren nightclub, about 20 foreign women could be seen wearing heavy make-up and looking for customers. Mr Nai told me that at the 150 Zhang Heqing start of 2001 around 50 foreign women were selling sex in City B, whereas there were as many as 200 to 300 women prior to 1997. This reduction in numbers is partly attributable to diminished demand for the services of foreign sex sellers, flowing from increased awareness of the spread of HIV/AIDS in countries that border China, and also due to the increased numbers of Chinese women selling sex in Yunnan Province. Many of these women could only speak a few words of Chinese, all of which were sex-related. They commanded very low prices, usually 30 yuan, although regular customers claimed that 10 yuan was enough to clinch a deal, with customers who were scared of STIs demanding oral sex. In general, these women conducted the prostitution transaction in a hurried and clandestine fashion to evade police apprehension. For example, one woman showed me a very small room that was just large enough for two people to stand in and told me that most of her business was conducted there. In short, female sexual service providers in Yunnan Province constantly face the risk of disease, especially the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. There are two main paths of disease transmission, one is through the sexual services they provide, and the other is through intravenous drug use. The women I interviewed maintained that they could earn around 200 yuan a day. At a cost of approximately 20 yuan per transaction, this means that an average female sex seller has to service more than 10 male clients a day. Their customers come from overseas and from all over China. Added to this, many women sell sex to support their drug habit. Most of them smoked drugs, but they also injected drugs and often shared needles. Without a proper knowledge of safe-sex methods, there is a high risk of infection both within this particular population of women and those who purchase their services, and within the broader community in general. This highlights the need for a more tolerant policy with regard to female sexual service providers in order to facilitate the task of disease prevention. Having said this, and contrary to popular opinion, it is important to acknowledge that the majority of women in prostitution are actually the victims of disease transmission rather than the active polluters of social health. According to Pan Suiming (2004: 352–9), the greatest threat to broader members of society in terms of the spread of HIV/AIDS comes from the following three types of people: (1) sex sellers who work for pimps or madams; (2) mistresses or hired wives (bao ernai) who formerly worked as sex sellers; and (3) buyers of sex and people with multiple sexual partners. Of these three groups of people, Pan argues that members of the third group, i.e. male customers who usually have money and power, are the most dangerous. These men are likely to occupy positions of power and influence, and therefore have broader social networks than those that are available to female sexual service providers and mistresses. Moreover, this particular group of ‘sex consumers’ is more likely to have contact both with female sexual service providers and members of other social groups, thereby facilitating the transmission of STIs and HIV/AIDS amongst different social groupings. It is also easier for them to sexually harass and even rape their female subordinates. However, given that the majority of these men occupy positions of power and influence, it is extremely difficult to ascertain both the nature of Female sex sellers and public policy 151 their sexual conduct and the extent to which they may be implicated in paths of disease transmission.

Selling sex and countering the ban on prostitution Apart from the threat of disease, female sexual service providers in the PRC are often subject to exploitation at the hands of clients, pimps, bosses, racketeers, and local government officials. During the course of my research, I learnt that arguments between female sex sellers and their customers are common because customers frequently refuse to pay for the services they demand. As a result, female sexual service providers have adopted various strategies to deal with such situations. One way that women in prostitution deal with difficult customers can be illustrated with reference to the example of Ms Dong, an approximately 20-year-old woman, who I met in City B. Dong came from a remote village in China. She had left home when she was 14 years old after a quarrel with her father and had subsequently started working as a prostitute. Dong told me that a lot of girls in the hair salon she worked at were taking drugs, but she did not. I believed her because she was energetic, talkative and did not show any interest in cigarettes or alcohol throughout the four or more hours that we talked together. Although Dong was not well educated, she liked to talk and had her own opinions. Her plan was to save as much money as possible so that she could help her parents, and ultimately go home, get married to her boyfriend and have children. She thought that spending money on heroin was a waste of hard-earned income. Even though some of the woman who used drugs commanded high prices, she ultimately earned more money than them because she did not have a drug habit to support. Dong told me that she stayed away from drugs, never kissed the customers, and always used condoms, and was basically very careful in terms of protecting her health. Dong believed that her money was earned – it was not derived from begging or stealing – and that customers should treat her accordingly. She explained that a customer had once refused to pay her. To ensure that he did so, she took away his pager and told him that she would take payment in kind from the property that belonged to the hotel they were in, hence he would have to pay the subsequent cost to the hotel. She further added that she was not afraid to take the case to the Chinese police if he continued refusing to pay. The customer was apparently afraid of the public exposure that might ensue if she went to the police (even though such an outcome was highly unlikely, given that it would also bring Dong to the attention of the police) and therefore finally paid her. To obtain protection from difficult customers, female sexual service providers are often forced to rely on the help of third parties, such as the owners of places of leisure and entertainment, which, in turn, can facilitate the swindling of customers. I came across one such case on the evening of 25 March 2001. About 9 p.m. that evening, I was walking around the city area of District C and discovered that all the nightclubs, sauna and fitness centres, and hair salons, were closed. At first glance, it seemed as though prostitution activities had been eliminated 152 Zhang Heqing by the ‘strike hard’ campaign of the previous year. However, after I took a taxi to a nearby developing zone, I saw a completely different picture. The taxi driver took me to the Great China Hotel, a large two-star hotel in a developing zone of District C. The driver told me that the sauna service at this particular centre was reputedly good. As soon as I got out of the taxi, several people came over to me. One of them introduced himself as a manager and said: ‘We have good connections; our services are excellent; and we have all kinds of girls’. When I followed the manager to the sauna room downstairs, he tried hard to sell certain services and girls to me. As he told me, the centre offered services such as ‘tuiyou’ or a massage with oil, for a tip of only 10 yuan to the girl who provided the service, and services such as ‘dapao’ or ‘fire the gun’ (quick vaginal penetration) for a tip of only 100 yuan. Just as the manager was telling me about these ‘special services’, I heard a commotion caused by an outraged customer. He claimed that when he arrived, the manager had told him that the centre had numerous girls, all from ethnic minority groups in China, i.e. groups that are viewed as different and ‘exotic’. When he entered a massage room, a woman approximately 25 years old had come in and said she was a member of an ethnic minority group. She apparently gave him a very perfunctory massage of his head, and then asked him to lie down while she massaged his back. Subsequently, she took off her clothes and began to massage the client with her breasts even though he had not requested such a service. The customer said he thought that this was strange but realized he had been ‘swindled’ when she asked for a tip of 800 yuan. When the man refused to pay the requested ‘tip’, the woman involved called over two fierce-looking men, one of whom happened to be the manager. In the end, the customer was forced to pay. Cases of swindling are apparently common in such venues. The relationship between female sexual service providers and the managers of public places of leisure and entertainment has also generated some unusual strategies to attract customers, as another example from District C shows. One day in a small border city of District C, my colleague and I saw a sign which read: ‘welcome to the primitive forest theme park’, and invited people to come and watch a dance performance by members of the local ethnic minority community. That evening, around 8 p.m., we went to see this show. About 40 people watched the whole performance. Most of these people were locals out for an evening of entertainment; some were local government inspectors, the rest were tourists from all over the country. The host at this particular performance was an ethnic minority male, who danced, sang and cracked off-coloured jokes. The first dance was called ‘Bathing girls’ and involved several young women untying their skirts and swaying in a very provocative manner. The second dance was about three men chasing a young girl. The first man gave the girl a photo of Liu Dehua (a pop star), which the girl threw away. The second man gave the girl a necklace, which the girl also threw away. The third man gave the girl 100 yuan and she smiled happily and threw herself into his arms. The couple then walked off into the forest, accompanied by the following words from the show’s host: ‘in commercial times, everyone loves money’. Female sex sellers and public policy 153 The last item on the programme drew on the traditional folk story ‘Princess Lan Piaopiao’, a story of a princess who wants to find a husband. Three men from the audience were encouraged to go up to the performance area and buy flowers for the performing princess. The princess subsequently exchanged presents with one of these men and they drank wedding wine. When the man who was hosting the show asked the princess if she was worried about the fact that the man was already married, she replied with a defiant, No! After the performance, the two ‘newly-weds’ were escorted to the so-called bamboo garden, which was a typical red-light area, with two karaoke venues. The princess subsequently led her guest either to one of the karaoke venues, a hotel suite, or to a small bamboo hut in the theme-park forest. The objective of all these walks into the forest was to engage in commercial sex, as I subsequently learnt from a woman I met during my stay at the theme park named Ah Cui. Ah Cui was about 20 years old and both of her parents were members of an ethnic minority group. I asked her if she minded showing me a bamboo hut and she took me to one that was deep inside the forest. The entire hut was about the size of a double bed. Inside there was a single bed and two small sofas. Outside there was a small toilet. It was quite clear that the bamboo hut was built for the sole purpose of brief sexual encounters. Once we were inside the hut, I excused myself by suggesting that it was not safe: the police might come. Ah Cui got very angry with me and suggested that we go further into the forest. When I subsequently tried to leave in a taxi, she got in the taxi with me and said: ‘we minority people are not afraid of anything and we do not act according to conventional rules’. Consequently, I was left with no choice other than to take her into town and talk with her for more than an hour at a BBQ stall. I eventually had to pay her a tip of 200 yuan before she left. While the preceding examples highlight the ingenuity of certain female sexual service providers, it remains the case that third parties exploit the majority of women in prostitution. For example, in order to avoid apprehension by the Chinese police, many women seek protection from pimps, bosses and secret (criminal) societies, and are obliged to pay for that assistance in the form of protection fees, management fees, room fees, bed fees, and so forth. Likewise, local government departments and officials frequently view female prostitutes as a source of revenue. As Pan Suiming (1997) explains, banning prostitution is no longer viewed as an ideological or law-enforcement activity in some areas. Instead, it has become a revenue-generating activity, with some ‘quasi policemen’ acting as if they were running a business by apprehending and subsequently fining sellers and buyers of sex. In other words, there is no right or wrong vis-à-vis the current policy of banning prostitution for pimps, bosses, racketeers, and certain local government officials: there are simply economic benefits to be gained from the fact that it is banned. The routine exploitation of women in prostitution in the PRC by third parties can be illustrated with reference to the story of Ms Hong, a 23-year-old Southeast Asian woman who I met one evening in January 2001 at Border Trade Street in City D. That evening, a middle-aged woman from Sichuan accosted me and 154 Zhang Heqing offered to introduce me to some foreign girls. Before I had a chance to say no, she had called over seven or eight women and asked me to choose one. I chose Hong and the woman asked me for 100 yuan. I wanted to give the money directly to Hong, but she insisted that I give the money to her, which I did with Hong’s agreement. However, as soon we sat down in a soft drink parlor, Hong borrowed my mobile to make a call and proceed to argue in a foreign language with another woman. Eventually, she passed the mobile back to me and asked me to talk to the woman at the other end. The woman told me that she had only received 50 yuan. I then confirmed that I had paid 100 yuan. ‘That woman is too greedy’, she replied. Afterwards, I asked Hong how much she would get. She told me that the Sichuanese woman who had introduced her to me would take 30 or 40 yuan, her boss, i.e. the woman she was speaking to on the phone and who ran the salon that Hong worked in, would take another 30 or 40 yuan, and she would get 20 or 30 yuan for herself. Contrary to popular opinion, therefore, female sexual service providers are not usually the primary beneficiaries of the provision of commercial sexual services. Under the current policy of prohibiting prostitution in the PRC, they are forced to rely and pay for protection from third parties. The policy of banning the selling and buying of sex in the PRC thus contributes to the economic hardship and exploitation experienced by many women in prostitution. At the same time, this policy contributes to the social stigmatization of such women, which complicates the already difficult task of preventing the spread of STIs and HIV/AIDS.

Conclusion From the case studies I conducted in Yunnan Province, it is not difficult to see that there is a considerable deviation between the intended goals of implementing prohibitive policies and their actual outcomes. Most notably, far from eradicating commercial sex, such policies cause an already marginalized group of women to suffer the additional threat of exploitation and disease. As a result, the PRC’s existing policies on prostitution should be altered. The question is in what way? China’s existing prostitution policies should be reconfigured to ensure the more equitable distribution of social resources, but this task is complicated by the reconfiguration of local and central interests that has accompanied the introduction of market reforms since December 1978. The process of economic reform had resulted in more power and autonomy being granted to local governments vis-à-vis central government; and, this has encouraged local and lower-level governmental authorities to replace the former emphasis on national interests with a new emphasis on local or even individual interests. To protect their interests, local and lower-level governmental authorities often develop countermeasures to deal with national policies. This is clearly the case with regard to the ban on prostitution. Contrary to the national policy of prohibiting commercial sex, some local governments think that the sex industry in China should be expanded to improve Female sex sellers and public policy 155 the investment environment, attract foreign investment, and stimulate the economy, especially the development of the service industry (tourism, restaurants, and entertainment, retail and taxi businesses). Some local officials even treat the sites where sexual services are offered as their own territories and places for their own pleasure. Because some local officials hold such mistaken attitudes, they protect the development of the sex industry in the areas under their jurisdiction. They receive benefits from female prostitutes in the form of management and protection fees, and they consider such prosperity to be a sign of their political achievement. It is quite common to hear people say: ‘this place is under the cover of so and so, hence it is very safe’. In short, the profits that can be made from the provision of commercial sexual services extend well beyond those that accrue to female sexual service providers. Local and lower-level governmental authorities, including members of the Chinese police and local security teams, seek to claim and protect their share of such profits (Pan 1997), as do brothel keepers, pimps, and bosses. Likewise, it is quite common for racketeers and criminal groups to become involved in the organization of the sex industry. When the different interests of so many groups are involved, it is not surprising that prostitution continues to flourish in China despite the existence of policies to ban it. It is also not surprising that various interest groups and individuals will ally in diverse ways to counteract the intended effects of the implementation of state policy. This is what people mean when they say: ‘those above can issue policies, but the people below always have countermeasures waiting to be used’. While deviations between the intended goals and actual outcomes of policy implementation are a common occurrence, the question is how to handle them. Addressing these deviations requires policy makers to advise and listen to both the implementers of policy and the objects of policy. This dual process is necessary to ensure that policy makers retain control over the original policy goals, whilst, at the same time, including the interests of those who are the objects of policy into those goals. Retaining control over original policy goals does mean that policy makers should blindly adhere to faulty policies. China is a vast country hence policy situations are inevitably complicated in local situations. Certainly, in terms of the PRC’s existing prostitution policy, it is necessary for policy makers to have a more nuanced approach than the immediate presumption of illegality allows. If we look at things from the point of view of differences, and have more focused policy aims, then the dilemmas and difficulties of policy implementation would be reduced. Deviations between the intended goals and actual effects of policy implementation are also influenced by the degree of consensus and, conversely, conflict regarding the underlying values of certain policies. The Chinese government’s harsh attitude toward the sex industry is generally in keeping with the ideological beliefs of the CCP. Most importantly, it is assumed that men and women are equal in ‘New China’, as the PRC has often been referred to since the revolution of 1949, which resulted in a proletarian democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class guided by the theory of Marxism. Marxist-based beliefs and ideals continue to be directing forces in the management of state affairs, 156 Zhang Heqing in economic construction, in systems setting, and in the formulation of policy and the prioritizing of affairs. Marx and Engels insisted that the systems of bourgeois marriage and prostitution that function to oppress all women would disappear along with the elimination of capitalist relations of production (see Engels 1972 [1884]). Flowing from this general contention, it was widely accepted in post-1949 China that prostitution is a product of the capitalist system of exploitation, and a reflection of the corrupted nature of life, and the denigrated position of the female sex, under such an unequal system. In turn, it was assumed that social evils like prostitution would not exist under socialism, since the establishment of socialism itself would lead to the elimination of gender differences stemming from institutionalized and unequal power relationships. Historically speaking, this understanding produced an intolerance of the system of prostitution, whilst female prostitutes, who were viewed as victims of class-based oppression and exploitation, were handled via a policy of ‘rescue and reeducation’. Unfortunately, history has taught us that the socialist understanding of prostitution and women’s liberation is limited. Class struggles do not necessarily result in freedom for women, because women are oppressed by the system of patriarchy, not capitalism alone. The limitations of the post-1949 understanding of the causes of prostitution – and hence the appropriate response – warrant more attention. Indeed, the inclusion of debates on gender is integral to reconfiguring the current response to the selling and buying of sex in China. However, the post-1949 understanding of the causes of prostitution, combined with the emphasis accorded to social stability by most sectors of the Chinese population, has meant that social problems like prostitution are considered to be social diseases. It is generally believed that if these social ‘diseases’ are not treated in a timely and drastic fashion, then the stability and health of the whole society will be affected. Hence governmental interventions designed to eradicate the selling and buying of sex are supported by many people in China. While understanding how these values have contributed to the enforcement of anti-prostitution policies, we need to reflect on the fact that ‘strike hard’ campaigns have signally failed to eradicate commercial sexual activities. Given that these campaigns have failed to eradicate prostitution yet engendered other negative consequences, perhaps it is time to think about how we might go about responding to the problem of prostitution from a different angle. Pan Suiming (2000) draws on the work of Engels to argue that it is time both to stop blaming prostitutes, and also to stop them from being exploited. What we need to consider now is the interests of female sexual service providers. As victims of the existing social system, we should ensure that they suffer no further hardship from social policies that attack their character, question their dignity, and entrench their poverty. The evident problem here is that most social policies are double-edged swords. Whilst acknowledging the positive effects of strong measures against commercial sexual services in terms of purifying social practice, realizing socialist ideals and maintaining social stability, we should also be aware of the problems that the implementation of anti-prostitution policies has brought in tow. Clearly, the targets Female sex sellers and public policy 157 of ‘strike hard’ campaigns need to be more strictly defined, because the population of people who are profiting from the existence of commercial sexual activities is highly complex. In the absence of well-defined targets, it is easy to harm innocent people, for example, handling an unqualified masseuse as a prostitute or treating all the girls who work in a hairdressing salon, or other kinds of venues, as sexual service providers. Doing so makes women the scapegoats, while those who are exploiting them – especially people with connections and power – evade punishment. In sum, the enforcement of the current policy of banning the selling and buying of sex in the PRC is inconsistent and inequitable. It therefore should be altered in keeping with a policy of decriminalization, i.e. a policy that continues to target those who profit from the exploitation of the prostitution of others, whilst removing government controls over female sellers of sex. Such a policy would retain the historical objection to the institution of prostitution in China, whilst ameliorating the exploitation that many women in prostitution experience.

Notes 1 This research was conducted with the support of the Ford Foundation, and with the help of Associate Professor Xiang Rong from the Department of Social Work at Yunnan University. 2 The Chinese term ‘xiaojie’ can be literally translated as young lady or miss, but is now commonly used to refer to women who act as ‘hostesses’ in public places of leisure and entertainment and whom often provide sex-related commercial services for ‘tips’. The English term ‘girl’ will be used as a substitute for the Chinese term ‘xiaojie’ in this chapter.

References 1997 Criminal Code of the People’s Republic of China (1998) trans. Wei Luo, Buffalo, New York: W. S. Hein and Co. Ai Hua and Li Yinhe (2001) ‘Guanyu nüxing zhuyi de duihua’ [A dialogue on feminism], Shehuixue yanjiu, Beijing, Issue 4. Cai Jianwen (1999) Zhongguo bushe hongdengqu [Red-light Districts are not Permitted in China], Fujian renmin chubanshe. Chen Chengwen (2000) Shehui ruozhe lun [On the Socially Vulnerable], Shishi chubanshe. ‘Communist Party discipline regulations’ (1997) Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, 10 April, trans. Selected World Broadcasts – China, 14 April, FE/2892 S2/1–18. ‘Duanping jiefang jinü’ [A brief commentary on the liberation of female prostitutes] (1949) Renmin ribao, 22 November, p. 1. Engels, F. (1972 [1884]) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, USA: International Publishers. Jeffreys, E. (2004) China, Sex and Prostitution, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Li Yinhe (2005) ‘Woguo yinggai ba maiyin dang daode wenti chuli’ [China should handle prostitution as a moral [not legal] issue], Jinyangwang, http://www.yfs.gov.au, 14 May. Pan Suiming (1997) ‘Zaitan Zhongguo dixia xingchanye’ [Another discussion of China’s underground sex industry], Jiedao, Issue 2. 158 Zhang Heqing Pan Suiming (1998a) Zhongguo dixia ‘hongdengqu’ [An Examination of an Underground ‘Red-light District’ in China], Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue, xing shehuixue yanjiusuo. Pan Suiming (1998b) ‘Zhongguo de jinchang zhengce yu shiji qingkuang fenxi’ [An analysis of China’s policy of banning prostitution and its effects], Bamian laifeng, November. Pan Suiming (2000) Shengcun yu tiyan: dui yige hongdengqu de zhuizong kaocha [Survival and Experience: An Examination of One Red-light District], Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexui chubanshe. Pan Suiming, Parish, W., Wang Aili and Edward Lauman (2004) Dangdai Zhongguoren de xing xingwei yu xing guanxi [Sexual Behaviour and Relation (sic) in Contemporary China], Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe. Quanguo renda changweihui, xingfashi, fazhi gongzuo weiyuanhui [Criminal Law Office and the Legal Council of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress] (1991) <> he <> shiyi [An Explanation of the Decision on Strictly Forbidding the Selling and Buying of Sex and the Decision on the Severe Punishment of Criminals Who Abduct and Traffic in or Kidnap Women and Children], Zhongguo jiancha chubanshe. Xiong Bingchun (2001) ‘Zhixing yanjiu fangfa zouyi: laizi shehui xingbie shijiao de tansuo’ [Qualitative research methods: explorations from the perspective of gender], Shehui yanjiu, Issue 5. Zhang Heqing (2002) Ruoshi qunti shengyin yu shehui gongzuo jieru [Subaltern Voices and Activist Social Work], Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe. Zhongguo guojia tongjiju [National Bureau of Statistics] (2001) Zhongguo tongji nianbao 5–25 [China Statistical Yearbook 2001: 5–25], http://210.72.32.26/yearbook2001/2002/ e0525c.htm (accessed 4 February 2004). Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan [State Council of the PRC] (1993) Maiyinpiao chang renyuan shourong jiaoyu banfa [Rules Regarding the Detention and Education of People Who Sell and Buy Sex], promulgated by the State Council on 4 September. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan [State Council of the PRC] (1999) Yule changsuo guanli tiaoli [Regulations concerning the management of public places of entertainment], Wenhua chubanshe. 8 Debating the legal regulation of sex-related bribery and corruption in the People’s Republic of China

Elaine Jeffreys

Introduction ‘Xing huilu’ or the phenomenon of sex-related bribery and corruption, is a recent focus of controversy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The term ‘xing huilu’ is generally attributed to Jin Weidong, a former MA student from the Law Faculty at Nanjing University, who currently works with the Public Prosecution Department of the Nanjing People’s Court (Meng 2001). On 6 December 2000, Jin presented a paper on the subject of sex-related bribery and corruption to the ‘Jiangsu Province Seminar on Criminal Law Research’. In this paper, he argued that the Chinese penal code should be amended to criminalize the activities of Party and government officials who accept or solicit a bribe in the form of sexual services (Dai and Lu 2000; Zhong 2000: 9). As Jin Weidong (2000: 83–7) explained, the PRC’s existing criminal code cannot be used to penalize people who offer and accept non-monetary or non-material forms of bribery, such as sexual bribery. This is because the 1997 Criminal Law refers to official bribery as an offer of property to a member of the working personnel of the state in return for a benefit, or for the assistance to obtain a benefit. But, he continued, sex-related bribery can entail more serious social and economic consequences than material forms of bribery, in that it promotes corruption, results in a loss of state resources, and leads to a deterioration of government functions. To underscore this claim, Jin raised the example of Cao Xiukang, the former Head of Customs in Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province, who had accepted ‘sexual services’ from a woman, Zhangyi, and then promised to make her the head of the provincial government’s representative office in Hong Kong. Compounding this act of ‘unfair promotion’, Zhangyi’s younger brother subsequently videotaped their sexual activities and used the tape to coerce Cao into facilitating his smuggling operations (Jin 2000: 83–7; Wu 2000). Although the so-called trade in power and sex (quanse jiaoyi) is not a new subject of controversy in the PRC (Zhi 2001), Jin Weidong’s proposal to criminalize sex-related bribery and corruption has generated debate due to the perception that this particular form of corruption is increasing. In China, the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection is responsible for handling corruption cases. Historically, this meant that high-ranking officials traditionally 160 Elaine Jeffreys remained outside of the reach of the Criminal Law, being dealt with on the basis of Party disciplinary regulations and other administrative sanctions. Briefly, the Chinese system of administrative sanctions deals with the activities of those who are deemed to have committed offences against the social order, but whose criminal liability is not viewed as sufficient to bring them before the courts. However, since September 1997, when Chen Xitong’s case was handed over to the courts, a growing number of high-ranking officials have been tried for corruption by the state procuratorial organs (Hao 1999: 414).1 Many of these high-ranking corruption cases have been variously linked to the trade in power and sex. The first and most notorious case involving allegations of sex-related bribery and corruption was that of Zhang Erjiang, the former Secretary of Tianmen City in Hubei Province. On 23–25 July 2002, Zhang Erjiang was tried for accepting bribes amounting to 700,000 yuan and US$4,300, and for embezzling 100,000 yuan in public funds (Li Gang 2002). During the course of this trial, media reports focused not only on his economic crimes, but also on his arguably more serious yet ‘not-punishable’ moral crimes. Zhang had reputedly abused his position of power and authority to have sex with over 100 women, including 15 female cadres. Of these 15 cadres, seven women had received a promotion following from their affair with Zhang, as had the husbands of two others. Extrapolating from this and other cases, media reports suggested that virtually 100 per cent of high-ranking corrupt officials who accept bribes and embezzle public funds either keep a mistress, exchange favours for sex, and/or hire the services of female sexual service providers (Dai and Lu 2000; Ji 2001; Li Zhufeng 2002: 22–3). What the public reputedly wants to know is why these officials have not faced additional legal charges for their involvement in sex-related corruption. This chapter examines the public and legal debate surrounding Jin Weidong’s proposal to criminalize the phenomenon of sex-related bribery and corruption in China. The first section explains how this proposal has been taken up in the public arena. In particular, it discusses media reports to the effect that there is strong public support for the criminalization of sexual bribery and corruption as constituting a social harm. The second section outlines legal arguments against criminalization. In apparent contrast to public opinion on this matter, many legal professionals in China are opposed to criminalization on the grounds that amending the criminal code is impractical and would constitute a violation of individual rights. By way of comparison, the third section examines the arguments put forward by Chinese academics and jurists who uphold the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption. So far as legal proponents of criminalization are concerned, amending the criminal code is an urgent and necessary task, one that will ensure the ‘normal’ and ‘fair’ operation of government, whilst simultaneously protecting women’s rights and interests. The fourth section suggests that this difference in legal opinion owes much to the history of regulating corruption and the trading of power and sex in the PRC. In conclusion, I argue that reference to this history paradoxically underscores the inability of both proponents and opponents of the criminalization of sexual bribery and corruption to devise regulatory strategies that seek to ensure Sex-related bribery and corruption 161 compliance through persuasion and education, rather than demanding compliance and/or relying on ‘after-the-fact’ punishment.

Garnering public support for the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption On 15 December 2000, only one week after the ‘Jiangsu Province Seminar on Criminal Law Research’, Jin Weidong’s contention that the criminal code should be amended to include the crime of sex-related bribery and corruption received public endorsement from China’s Deputy Procurator-General, Zhao Dengju (Zhang 2000). During the course of an ‘anti-corruption’ news conference convened by the Supreme Procuratorate, Zhao stated that recent campaigns have highlighted the extensive and changing nature of corruption in present-day China. As Zhao explained, incomplete statistics indicate that China’s procuratorial organs are investigating and handling an increasing number of corruption cases every year. In 1998, they dealt with 837 cases; in 1999, they dealt with 984 cases; and, by 1 November 2000, they had dealt with 1,199 cases (ibid.). In addition, Zhao pointed out that cases of corruption in the PRC have spread to new and diverse professional domains. Whereas cases of bribery and corruption were originally most serious in areas relating to construction and engineering projects, finance and negotiable securities, and housing, land and property, they are now prevalent in the realms of health and hygiene, culture and education, and government and judicial departments. Concomitantly, the alleged motivations for involvement in bribery and corruption have proliferated, and include considerations such as: forgery; tax evasion; foreign exchange racketeering; smuggling; using money and connections to obtain backdoor promotions; and using illegal means to lobby for votes. Last, but not least, Zhao stated that, amongst large cases investigated by the procuratorial organs that involved government officials at a ministerial level, almost every case entailed some form of trading in power and sex. He therefore concluded that criminalizing the practice of sexual bribery and corruption would constitute an important measure in China’s ongoing fight against corruption (ibid.). Arguments in favour of criminalizing sex-related bribery and corruption received another public airing in March 2001 when Zhao Ping, a People’s Representative from Sichuan Province, called on the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) to halt the trade in power and sex by amending the criminal code (‘Renda daibiao jianyi: lifa chengzhi xing huilu’ 2001). Media reports suggest that Zhao Ping, and 17 other representatives, asked the NPC to criminalize sex-related bribery and corruption on the grounds that the practice of unlawful businessmen using or hiring ‘hostesses’ (sanpei xiaojie),2 ‘public relations girls’ (gongguan xiaojie), and female sellers of sex (maiyin funü), to bribe party officials and company managers had become commonplace. Moreover, they asserted that this particular method of securing illegitimate benefits constituted a serious social harm, since it resulted in corruption, the abuse of power, and the loss of state assets and resources (ibid.). 162 Elaine Jeffreys Although the NPC ultimately rejected Zhao Ping’s proposal, arguments supporting the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption as a social harm have continued to receive widespread media coverage in China. Indeed, media commentators often contend that such a proposal is strongly supported by members of the general public. According to various journalistic and academic accounts, a survey conducted by the Social Survey Institute of China indicated that 84.7 per cent of respondents agreed that the criminal code should be amended to include the crime of sexual bribery and corruption. Only 6.2 per cent of the survey respondents disagreed with the proposed amendment and 9.1 per cent were unsure (He (ed.) 2002; Tan 2002). Media reports based on a general canvassing of public opinion suggest that there is strong support for the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption precisely because the practice is perceived to be increasing (Li Gang 2002; Wang Jin 2002). For example, an unspecified investigation conducted in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai during 1999, indicated that of 102 high-ranking government officials who were tried for corruption, more than 95 per cent had a ‘mistress or second wife’ (bao ernai), and some even had three or four mistresses (Shao 2002; Wang and Liu 2000). Investigations conducted by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the All-China Women’s Federation similarly suggest that virtually every corrupt official has a mistress or second wife (Xie Donghui 2003; Zhao Chengliang 2001: 7). Given that the cost of keeping such women reputedly comes from public monies at an estimated cost of US$700–1,000 per mistress per month, or else from funds provided by another party with the anticipation of obtaining illegitimate benefits, it is not surprising that the issue of sexual bribery and corruption has been publicly condemned as yet another instance of the perceived manifest abuse of power in China, and one that adds to the PRC’s growing number of social problems relating to the family and marriage (‘Bao ernai zai Zhongguo’ 2001). The routine association of the trade in power and sex with China’s rising number of familial and marital problems is demonstrated by the recent development of legal and other strategies designed to control the practice of ‘hiring or keeping second wives or mistresses’. For example, the practice of keeping a mistress or second wife now constitutes official grounds for women to obtain a divorce with economic compensation according to the PRC’s new Marriage Law of 2001 (Liu Yuhong et al. 2001; see also the chapter by Woo in this volume). Private detective agencies specializing in tracking down ‘second wives’ so that the original spouse can initiate divorce proceeding are reputedly establishing variously successful businesses on the mainland (Cheng 2003). ‘First-wives clubs’ have been set up by religious and other organizations in Hong Kong to console those women whose husbands have set up a second home with another partner and family on the mainland (‘Bao ernai zai Zhongguo’ 2001). Moreover, the ‘Communist Party discipline regulations’ (1997) proscribe government officials from keeping a second wife, hiring a short-term mistress, or buying sexual services. In short, supporters of Jin Weidong’s proposal to criminalize sex-related bribery and corruption contend that rates of corruption are increasing in China, and that a substantial number of corruption cases are sex-related. Hence they also Sex-related bribery and corruption 163 maintain that the lack of legislation referring to non-material forms of bribery in the existing criminal code constitutes a legal ‘loophole’ that should be addressed to halt the spread of corruption. However, alongside broad reportage of arguments in favour of criminalizing sexual bribery and corruption, the Chinese media has pointed to the existence of legal opposition to the proposal. The next section therefore outlines the broad parameters of legal arguments against Jin Weidong’s proposal.

Legal opposition to the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption If the Chinese media has provided extensive coverage of popular arguments in favour of criminalizing sex-related bribery and corruption, it has also reported on the existence of legal opposition to such a proposal (Feng 2001: 93–6). In apparent contrast to public opinion, legal scholars associated with the so-called ‘Beijing Faction’, including Professor Gao Mingxuan, from the Law Faculty at the People’s University of China in Beijing, and Professor Bai Jianjun, from the Law Faculty at Beijing University, are vehemently opposed to the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption. Members of the Beijing Faction contend that legal professionals associated with the so-called ‘Shanghai Faction’, including China’s Deputy Procurator-General, Zhao Dengju, and Professor Sun Guoxiang from the Law Faculty at Nanjing University, are mistaken in their efforts to have the existing criminal code revised (Tan 2002). As they argue, the term ‘xing huilu’ has entered popular parlance, being used consistently in the media to condemn the decadent lifestyle of corrupt officials, presumably because it is easy to sell the ‘heady’ combination of sex and corruption. But, they continue, ‘xing huilu’ is not an appropriate term for use by judiciary bodies in China because it lacks legal precision (Li Gang 2002). According to members of the Beijing Faction, the PRC’s criminal code should not be amended to include the crime of sex-related bribery and corruption for five reasons. First, the crime of bribery as stipulated in Articles 385 and 389 of the 1997 Criminal Law refers to the offer and subsequent acceptance of money or property to a member of the working personnel of the state in return for a benefit, or for the assistance to obtain a benefit (‘Demystifying the PRC Bribery Law’ (n.d.)). However, unlike money or property, ‘sex’ does not possess a transferable or quantifiable quality. In legal terms, therefore, amending the criminal code to include the crime of sex-related bribery and corruption would have the undesirable effect of reducing the human body and human attributes to the status of commodities or ‘things’ (Chen Jieren 2000; Liu Rongsheng 2001). Consequently, members of the Beijing Faction contend that this way of conceptualizing the nature of the body and sexuality runs counter to traditional Chinese understandings of the sanctity of male/female relationships, thus the act of criminalizing sexual bribery and corruption ultimately would not receive public support. Second, members of the Beijing Faction argue that the act of criminalizing sex-related bribery and corruption might result in the curtailment, rather than extension, of individual rights. This is because the sexual relationship at the centre 164 Elaine Jeffreys of sex-related bribery and corruption is usually based on mutual consent. While concurring that the activities of working personnel of the state need to be made more transparent and open to public scrutiny, members of the Beijing Faction maintain that consensual sexual relationships are a personal or private matter, and hence an inappropriate object of governmental intervention. They subsequently conclude that the act of criminalizing sexual bribery and corruption would constitute a violation of the rights of individual citizens and government officials alike to privacy (Liu Rongsheng 2001; ‘“Xing huilu” lifa bing buke xing’ 2001). Third, supporters of the Beijing Faction insist that the penal code should not be amended to include the crime of sex-related bribery and corruption because it would be impossible to enforce such a law in practice (Tan 2002). As they argue, the current Criminal Law punishes the severity of the crime of bribery according to the amount of property that is involved. The evident problem here is the question of how the courts should go about quantifying the nature and extent of bribery when the unit of exchange is ‘sex’. Both the nature of the sexual relationship in cases of sex-related bribery and corruption, and also the actual extent of bribery and corruption, is known only by the relevant parties, who are unlikely to confess their crimes or leave evidence that can be used to convict them (Yang 2000). This means that the courts would be forced to rely on oral confessions and statements from other parties, which might lead to the faulty prosecution of certain cases. Specifically, the courts might be inclined to convict corrupt officials on the basis of public opinion rather than according to the letter of the law. Indeed, members of the Beijing Faction contend that the problems associated with the collection of evidence in cases of sex-related bribery and corruption would, if the courts abided by the letter of the law, result in a low rate of successful prose- cutions. In turn, the difficulties associated with the successful prosecution of such cases might have the unwanted effect of diminishing, rather than enhancing, public confidence in governmental efforts to stamp out corruption (Wu 2000; ‘“Xing huilu” lifa ... ’ 2001). In other words, supporters of the Beijing Faction insist that it would undermine recent efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to demonstrate that it is a legitimate government that can command popular support, by intimating that it does not take the battle against corruption seriously. Fourth, members of the Beijing Faction argue that the act of criminalizing sex- related bribery and corruption would go against China’s operative legal principle of using minimum legal sanctions to maximum effect, by imposing overly punitive sanctions on what is essentially an ethical problem (Tan 2002; ‘“Xing huilu” lifa ... ’ 2001). In their view, apart from the possibility that government officials might end up being tried on the basis of moral condemnation, rather than impar- tial legal procedures, the act of changing the criminal code would involve the extension of punitive provisions to groups of people who are not currently subject to criminal sanctions, such as second wives/mistresses, hostesses, and female sellers of sex. This is because laws designed to halt the trade in power and sex could not be directed at the activities of corrupt officials alone (Li Gang 2002). If sexual bribery and corruption were criminalized, or so members of the Beijing Faction aver, the courts would be forced to consider the legal responsibility of all Sex-related bribery and corruption 165 the various parties involved. That is to say, the courts would be obliged to establish the penalties applicable to those who offer and accept an official ‘sexual’ bribe, and they would also have to consider the relative legal responsibility of the women who are offered by another party as a bribe and/or who offer themselves as a bribe. Finally, members of the Beijing Faction maintain that amending the criminal code is unnecessary because practices pertaining to sex-related bribery and corruption can be penalized on the basis of existing legal provisions (‘Chengzhi quanse jiaoyi mo bingji luantouyi’ 2000; ‘Xin huilu xianxiang’ 2000). For example, the act of offering and accepting bribes can be handled according to Articles 8 and 22 of the Law of the People’s Republic of China Against Unfair Competition (1993). These Articles refer to bribery in terms of obtaining illegitimate benefits through the offering of money or goods, or by any other means, and therefore could be extended to include non-material forms of bribery. Likewise, the activities of corrupt officials who use bribes or embezzle public funds to keep a mistress, and/or to hire the services of female sexual service providers, can be penalized according to administrative provisions outlined in the ‘Communist Party discipline regulations’ (1997), the 2001 Marriage Law (Liu Yuhong et al. 2001), and the 1991 Decision on Strictly Forbidding the Selling and Buying of Sex (Quanguo renda changweihui, xingfashi bianzhu, fazhi gongzuo weiyuanhui 1991). For example, during 1988, the Discipline Inspection Commission of the CCP issued a set of regulations designed to penalize party members for involvement in prostitution-related activities and the trading of power and sex (Shan 1995: 698–9). These measures have since been incorporated into the ‘Chinese Communist Party discipline regulations’, which were issued for trial implementation in April 1997. Article 132 of these regulations, under the heading ‘Mistakes that seriously violate socialist ethics’, states that any party member who has sexual intercourse with others by ‘using their powers, their superior or senior positions, seduction, cheating, or other means, shall be dismissed from their party posts’ (‘Communist Party discipline regulations’ 1997: 15–16). Following the introduction of these measures, the Chinese media has publicized numerous cases of government officials being convicted and disciplined for abusing their positions and using public funds to keep mistresses, to patronize sexual service providers, and to buy the ‘company’ of women in entertainment venues (‘Guangdong court judge sacked for hiring prostitutes’ 2000; ‘Zhifa renyuan baoyang “sanpei” yisheng diudiao “wusha”’ 1999). In sum, legal opponents of Jin Weidong’s proposal to criminalize sex-related bribery and corruption advocate a more cautious approach to the application of criminal law. Members of the Beijing Faction, in particular, contend that penalizing the phenomenon of sex-related bribery and corruption as a crime is not a matter for immediate consideration. However, while the Chinese media has provided extensive coverage of legal opposition to the criminalization of sexual bribery and corruption, it has also covered legal arguments to the effect that the Beijing Faction’s call for caution is misjudged. Hence the next section examines the legal arguments in support of Jin Weidong’s proposal. 166 Elaine Jeffreys

Legal arguments in support of the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption Responding to the arguments put forward by members of the Beijing Faction, Chinese academics and jurists who support the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption contend that calls for legal caution are misjudged (Tan 2002). As they argue, the suggestion that the concept of sex-related bribery and corruption lacks legal precision and therefore cannot be included within the criminal code is contradicted by reference to legal precedent. Although the PRC’s existing Criminal Law refers to bribery in terms of property, the relevant Articles can be expanded to include non-material benefits, and even concepts of ‘desire’. To support this claim, legal proponents of criminalization cite theoretical precedents for the inclusion of bribery laws that deal with non-material benefits, and notions of ‘desire’, by referring to the historical examples of the Chinese Tang and Qing Dynasty legal statutes, and the more recent examples of Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese and Taiwanese law (Ji 2001; Jin 2000; Tan 2002). According to legal proponents of criminalization, all of these legal systems adopt an understanding of bribery that includes concepts of ‘desire and need’, and hence can be extended to cover forms of bribery that do not possess the material and transferable nature of money and goods (ibid.). Concomitantly, Chinese academics and jurists who support the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption reject the Beijing Faction’s contention that such an action would entail the legal fallacy of turning the human body and human attributes into commodities or ‘things’. For members of the Shanghai Faction, this contention is a theoretical abstraction that is out of step with reality. It not only elides the fact that people are already treated in practice like commodities, but also ignores the evident need to legislate against the new forms of criminality that have emerged in the era of economic reform (Tan 2002). Moreover, contrary to the suggestion that criminalization would prove unacceptable to the Chinese people because it contradicts traditional understandings of human sexual relationships, members of the Shanghai Faction point out that the Chinese people appear to have long since overcome such ‘traditional rectitude’, as the responses to the survey conducted by the Social Survey Institute of China show (ibid.). Legal supporters of criminalization also insist that counter-arguments based on notions of mutual consent and privacy function to excuse the existence of sex-related bribery and corruption by portraying it as a ‘life-style problem’ of the propertied classes, rather than a serious social order problem (He (ed.) 2002). While concurring that the rights of individuals to privacy should be respected, members of the Shanghai Faction contend that legal opponents of criminalization overlook the more fundamental right of the Chinese people to ‘know’ that they have an honest, effective and answerable form of government (Dai and Lu 2000; Wu 2000). With reference to the USA, they maintain that the rights to privacy of high-ranking government officials are inevitably circumscribed, whether flowing from the introduction of auditing practices or from laws ensuring public access to information (Tan 2002). Thus legal and other supporters of the criminalization of Sex-related bribery and corruption 167 sex-related bribery and corruption conclude that the right of the general public to ‘know’ about the activities of those in government far outweighs the individual rights of government officials to privacy. Furthermore, they contend that criminalization will promote women’s rights and interests by countering male chauvinism, thereby preventing more women from being turned into commodities (Pan Zimian 2001; Tan 2002). Contrary to the Beijing Faction’s suggestion that the crime of sex-related bribery and corruption would be impossible to enforce in practice, members of the Shanghai Faction contend that criminalization is an important first step towards halting corruption and malpractice within governmental departments, including the judiciary (Tan 2002). The general argument here is that, in prosecuting future cases of high-ranking corruption, the courts might be inclined to operate beyond the existing boundaries of the Criminal Law in order to appease public opinion. Conversely, as has already been demonstrated in a number of high-ranking corruption cases, members of the judiciary themselves have become a new target of bribes from government officials accused of corruption, the family members of accused officials and other relevant parties, so that all the involved parties can evade appropriate punishment. Consequently, legal proponents of criminalization conclude that the National People’s Congress, and its associated legal organs, should amend the 1997 Criminal Law both to establish correct procedural guidelines and to aid China’s ongoing battle against corruption (Ji 2001). While concurring that obtaining evidence and establishing the precise degree of responsibility in cases of sex-related bribery and corruption will be difficult, members of the Shanghai Faction insist that these difficulties should not be an obstacle to amending the criminal code (Tan 2002). As they argue, the arguments put forward by the Beijing Faction are based on an understanding of the existing law rather than an understanding of what the law might look like. Far from encouraging overzealousness within the judiciary itself, legal and other proponents of the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption aver that the public trial of large cases will function to ensure the adoption and implementation of correct procedures (Xie Yichao 2002: 70–6). Put another way, legal supporters of criminalization maintain that turning sex-related bribery and corruption into a crime would resolve some of the existing problems associated with the execution of a modern ‘rule of law’ in China. Adding to this line of argument, legal supporters of the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption contend that the degree of responsibility in such cases should be determined not according to the amount paid for the services of a second wife, a hired mistress, or a female seller of sex, but rather according to the degree of social harm that is caused by the offer and subsequent acceptance of such a bribe (Tan 2002; Xie Yichao 2002: 70–6). A frequently cited example in this respect is the case of Lai Changxin, who paid the expenses for the mistress of Yang Qianxian, the former Head of Customs in Xiamen City, Fujian Province, which is geographically close to Taiwan. As proponents of criminalization argue, it would not be difficult to ascertain the amount of money Lai Changxin forwarded to cover such expenses. However, this cost would be minimal when compared to 168 Elaine Jeffreys the harm and loss of revenue caused by Yang Qianxian’s subsequent agreement to turn a blind eye to Lai’s smuggling activities (ibid.). Another popular example is the case of a female ‘hostess’ who offered herself as a bribe to a certain official and was subsequently appointed as the Deputy-Director of the News Section of the Jingmen City Propaganda Department in Hubei Province (Wu 2000). According to legal supporters of criminalization, both of these examples illustrate the vast harm that sexual bribery and corruption causes to the normal functioning of government. In doing so, they not only point to the necessity of introducing new legislation, but also to the necessity of introducing new ways of calculating the degree of criminal responsibility for all the involved parties (Tan 2002; Xie Yichao 2002: 70–6). Contrary to the arguments put forward by members of the Beijing Faction, legal supporters of the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption maintain that the introduction of new laws would not go against the legal principle of using minimum legal sanctions to maximum effect (Tan 2002). As they argue, members of the Beijing Faction have got their arguments back to front. This is because the principle of leniency has two complementary components: it is designed to reduce the use of criminal sanctions whilst simultaneously realizing the maximum social effect. Hence, in situations where the existing law has proved to be ineffective, stronger deterrents are necessary to ensure the ‘normal’ and ‘fair’ operation of government and governmental administration. While concurring with the Beijing Faction that the function of the law is not to be overly interventionist, legal proponents of the criminalization of sexual bribery and corruption conclude that Chinese law is basically ‘silent’ with regard to the subject of sex-related bribery and corruption and therefore has to be changed (ibid.). Members of the Shanghai Faction concur that this may well entail extending criminal sanctions to previously non-targeted groups of individuals. However, they contend that such is the cost of stamping out corruption (Wu 2000). Last, but not least, members of the Shanghai Faction agree with members of the Beijing Faction that practices pertaining to sex-related bribery and corruption can be penalized on the basis of legal and administrative measures designed to fight corruption, illegality and the selling and buying of sex, but they insist that these measures should be implemented more strictly and vigorously (Tan 2002). Most notably, legal proponents of criminalization maintain that the ‘Communist Party discipline regulations’ (1997) should be used to punish corrupt officials more seriously, in part, by introducing techniques of public shaming (Ji 2001). Likewise, they contend that stricter management controls should be exercised over public places of leisure and entertainment, which are a recognized front for corruption and illicit sexual practices in China (ibid.). In the early 1990s, for instance, the National Bureau of Statistics estimated that between 60 and 70 per cent of the income accruing to high-grade hotels, guest- houses, restaurants and karaoke/dance venues, came from consumers spending public funds, at an estimated annual cost to the public of around 800 billion yuan (Wang Tie 1993: 35; Zhao Jianmei 1994: 35). Given that these consumers are predominantly (male) government employees, it is generally accepted that their Sex-related bribery and corruption 169 conduct has to be corrected. Thus, practices such as spending public funds within commercial recreational venues, using public funds to hire the company of ‘short- term mistresses/hostesses’, and local government complicity in the running of illicit businesses, were constructed as problems in need of urgent remedial attention. During the mid to late 1990s, therefore, China’s relevant authorities introduced a whole host of regulations designed to ban members of the public security forces, and other kinds of government employees, both from running recreational and entertainment venues and from protecting illegal business operations in this connection. Concurrently, numerous regulations were introduced to curb the spending of public funds within such venues (‘Army banned from business’ 1998; ‘China bans public-funded police entertainment’ 1995). These measures are now being enforced, not strictly on the basis of police-led campaigns and information derived from public informants, but also on the basis of disciplinary procedures that are both new and integral to the reform era itself, namely, via the practice established in 1998 of auditing government officials, and thereby combining the resources of the CCP’s disciplinary committees with those of the State Auditing Administration (Bruel and Wu 2000). However, in contrast to the arguments put forward by members of the Beijing Faction, legal proponents of the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption argue that the PRC’s existing laws and regulations on corruption, illegality, and the selling and buying of sex, constitute an insufficient deterrent (Tan 2002). To offer one example, businessmen who hire the services of female sex sellers in order to bribe a government official can be prosecuted according to laws that criminalize the act of introducing others into prostitution (Dai and Lu 2000; Tan 2002; ‘Xinghuilu zai sifa shijian zhong de chuli’ 2000). In fact, in October 2002, a court in Jiangsu Province made Chinese legal history by sentencing a business- man, Xu Bin, to one year’s imprisonment on precisely these grounds (Jiang 2003). Briefly, Xu Bin was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for hiring the services of female sellers of sex and subsequently offering those services as a ‘gift’ to a local bureaucratic entrepreneur3 in exchange for the promise of improved business transactions with his company. The procurator in charge of Xu Bin’s case stated that it had the nature and characteristics of the much-discussed issue of sex-related bribery and corruption. However, in the absence of specific criminal laws on this subject, he had determined to prosecute the case according to its secondary or analogous, prostitution-related features (ibid.). Returning to the arguments put forward by members of the Shanghai Faction, however, the successful prosecution of such cases requires establishing that the woman who is offered as a bribe is a seller of sex, or otherwise it would be impossible to mount such a case. After all, Xu Bin’s case only came to light because Chinese police had raided the ‘beauty shop’ from which Xu Bin had hired the services of female sex sellers, and the relevant women involved had subsequently informed the police of his activities (ibid.). Given the existence of such loopholes, combined with the proliferating forms of sex-related bribery and corruption that exist in China today, supporters of the Shanghai Faction conclude that amending the criminal code is the only realistic legal deterrent (Tan 2002). 170 Elaine Jeffreys To summarize the preceding remarks, legally based arguments in support of and against the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption are marked by a common concern with the question of how to regulate the appropriate ethical conduct of government officials in the changed era of economic reform. But they turn on a fundamental difference of opinion concerning the appropriate role of ‘the law’ with regard to the regulation or governance of ethical behaviour, especially sex-related behaviour. This difference in legal opinion owes much to the history of regulating corruption and the trading of power and sex in the PRC.

Regulating corruption and the trading of power and sex in the PRC Although corruption has been a focus of governmental and public concern ever since the founding of the PRC in 1949, there is a growing conviction that corruption and cadre misconduct are now widespread, flowing from the introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and Open Door Policy in December 1978. The promise of a ‘cleaner government’, and hence the elimination of corruption, was a key component of the legitimating formula of the early Communist Party. Whilst never eradicating corruption per se, the Maoist regime did manage to exercise a high degree of control over the behaviours of government officials, due to the Leninist organizational structure of the Party, the promotion of values based on the notion of ‘serving the people wholeheartedly’, and through the implementation of mass-line political campaigns (Lianjiang Li 2001: 573–86). Briefly, mass-line campaigns mobilized the populace to report on and criticize cadre wrongdoings (amongst numerous other things), rather than relying on the day-to-day operation of institutions like the courts and the police. Hence, during the 1950s, political campaigns were launched against what were termed the ‘Three-anti’s’ (‘corruption, waste and bureaucracy’) and the ‘Five-anti’s’ (‘bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing economic information’) (Hao 1999: 411). Corrupt cadre behaviour was also a key focus of the Cultural Revolution, which is now said to have lasted from 1966 until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. Following the proclaimed disaster of this latter event, Deng Xiaoping not only announced the end of large-scale mass campaigns, but also overturned the Maoist logic of politics in command by setting China on her current course of modernization, thereby making the logic of the economy coterminous with that of government. In keeping with the new governmental rationale of the reform era, or, more precisely, the growing conviction that ‘the market economy is a legal- system economy’ (Chen, A.H.Y. 1996: 4), the CCP has moved toward improving the ethical behaviour of government officials with recourse to legal as opposed to mass-line and administrative mechanisms. This does not mean that campaign methods have been completely abandoned in the era of economic reform. On the contrary, corruption was a major target of police-led campaigns launched in 1982–1983, 1988–1989, and 1991–1993; and corruption is a major focus of recent campaigns to ‘strike hard’ against criminality, illegality, and the selling and buying Sex-related bribery and corruption 171 of sex. It is simply to point out that there has been an explosion of new institutions and legal mechanisms designed to deal with the problem of corruption from the supposedly less politicized standpoint of the ‘rule of law’, as opposed to the now denigrated Maoist ‘rule of man’. But, if the ‘rule of law’ is now viewed as a major tool in the battle against cadre misconduct and malfeasance, the move towards legally specifying corruption has been complicated by the rapidly expanding range of activities that are now deemed ‘corrupt’. As Yufan Hao (1999: 406) explains, ‘scholars tend to treat corruption as the illegitimate use or appropriation of public roles or resources by public or private parties’. However, Hao’s examination of corruption reports in the Chinese press between June 1993 and September 1998 revealed that the forms of official conduct which are labelled ‘corrupt’ included:

not only embezzlement and bribery, but also offences against financial and economic discipline, swindling and indiscriminate collection of fees; blackmail, smuggling, black market currency exchanges; establishing illegal businesses by governmental agencies, resale profiteering, and substitution of defective or counterfeit goods; excessive housing; illegal price increases, indiscriminate issuance of bonuses, and malpractice in assigning jobs and promoting cadres; work units’ ‘small treasuries’ (xiao jinku); illegal transfer of public assets; gambling, ticket scalping, visiting prostitutes, decadent behaviour, usury, outright piracy, insider trading in the new security markets and future markets, ignoring laws, perverting justice for a bribe, imposing fines and making unjustified financial levies at random, deceiving their superiors and deluding their subordinates, vocational misconduct, and so on (Hao 1999: 407).

Instances of sex-related bribery and corruption clearly constitute yet another addition to this extensive if somewhat imprecise list of cadre behaviours that are viewed as ‘corrupt’. This proliferation of activities that are deemed ‘corrupt’ does not so much demonstrate an increased rate of corruption in China as highlight a broader uncertainty about how to deal with the new range of behaviours that have accompanied the process of economic reform. It is common knowledge that the trading of power and sex took place in Mao’s China, in the form of both high and low-ranking cadres abusing their positions of power and authority to have sex with women in exchange for the promise of work transfers and promotions. During the Cultural Revolution period, in particular, this abuse of power took place in the form of cadres having sex with young urbanities who had been ‘sent down’ to the rural countryside, with ‘sent down’ youth exchanging ‘sex’ in the hope of being transferred home or being allocated lighter work duties (Honig 2003: 143–75; Pan Suiming 1996: 20–1). That said, such practices remained highly restricted in nature during the Maoist period, due to the tight social control networks that were exercised through the regulation and development of the household registration and work-unit systems. In contrast, such practices reputedly have become 172 Elaine Jeffreys widespread and ‘visible’ in recent years, due to the changed environment of the economic reform period. Certainly, the problem of sex-related bribery and corruption is routinely linked to the changing sexual mores and lifestyles that economic reform has brought in tow (Ling 2002; Wang and Liu 2000). A standard argument here is that increased public tolerance of premarital and extramarital affairs in the ‘post-Mao’ era has meant that sexual affairs outside of marriage are no longer viewed as a political matter, and hence a potential social order offence. Instead, ‘sex’ is increasingly understood as a private matter, with practices relating to the selling and buying of sex, and the keeping of a second wife, being viewed as a moral or life-style problem, not as a legitimate target for punitive governmental intervention (ibid.). Concomitantly, the ostentatious and high-consumption lifestyles associated with China’s newly rich class of private business entrepreneurs have become the para- doxical focus of public praise and condemnation, with many people desiring a taste of the ‘good life’ for themselves, and others criticizing the ‘new rich’ for displaying limited moral and social values. Media reports, for instance, frequently condemn the high-consumption lifestyles of China’s newly rich business entrepreneurs, whilst simultaneously regaling their readers with voyeuristic stories of how such men can be recognized instantly by the presence of beautiful young women by their sides (Wang and Liu 2000). Both this perceived change in sexual mores, combined with the high status that accrues to the ostentatious lifestyle of China’s ‘new rich’, are viewed as contributing to the expansion of sexual bribery and corruption. A routine argument here is that 59-year-old cadres who have dedicated their life to the revolution are facing a new kind of ‘mid-life crisis’, in that they are approaching retirement and can see no visible benefits from their years of political dedication and hard work (ibid.). Instead, given the rapid political, social and economic changes that have accompanied the process of economic reform, they are allegedly left wondering why others have benefited from the transformations that they helped to set in place. Moreover, faced with the rapid onset of retirement, it is claimed that they want to avail themselves of the final opportunity to partake of the new opportunities and lifestyles that economic reform has brought in tow (ibid.). According to academic and journalistic commentators alike, this conjunction of factors has promoted the spread of sex-related bribery and corruption. As they argue, veteran cadres are neither easily seduced by the offer of material forms of bribery, nor are they overly willing to engage in outright acts of embezzlement or graft (Meng 2001; Wang Jin 2002; Zhou Shijun 2000). The introduction of economic reforms undoubtedly has opened the window for a small if highly corrupt number of government officials to accept bribes and appropriate state resources on a grand scale. But the introduction of harsh legal sanctions against such measures, combined with the traditional Maoist condemnation of such activities and the raising of cadre salaries, has ensured that most Party members and working personnel of the state still view such activities as morally and politically reprehensible. Consequently, most working personnel of the state will reject offers of bribery unless the offer involves extraordinary sums of money or Sex-related bribery and corruption 173 property (ibid.). However, when it comes to the issue of sex, or so many media commentators claim, the story is somewhat different. Cadres who would otherwise resist involvement in bribery and corruption are easily led on to the path of ‘decadence and corruption’ because they no longer see the provision of sexual services as a political and social order problem (Zhao Chengliang 2001). Indeed, the now pervasive nature of sexual bribery and corruption is demonstrated by the fact that recent cases have involved not only veteran cadres, but also ‘49-year-old’, ‘39-year-old’ and even ‘29-year-old’ government officials (Guo 2002; Wang and Liu 2000). In the opinion of many media commentators, therefore, the crackdown on more orthodox forms of corruption alongside the continued lack of severe legal punishments for sex-related bribery and corruption has simply encouraged the spread of such behaviours. As they argue, the practice of unlawful businessmen using or hiring ‘hostesses’, ‘public relations girls’, and female sellers of sex, to bribe party officials and company managers into giving them favourable business deals or protection has become commonplace (Li Zhufeng 2002: 22–3). Likewise, the practice of women offering themselves as a bribe in return for work promotions and other opportunities is increasing (ibid.). A frequently cited example in this regard is the case of Jiang Yanping, who was tried on 20–23 March 2001 for embezzlement and abusing her position of power and authority to gain favourable business deals for members of her family (Da 2002). Although Jiang was subsequently castigated in the Chinese press as an example of an ‘upstart official’ who obtained a senior position by sleeping with her superiors, she is also claimed to have defended her actions by stating: ‘In a male-dominated world, a smart woman has to exploit the value that men place on the female sex’ (Li Zhufeng 2002: 22–3). Flowing from an examination of this and other cases, media reporters maintain that the motivations for offering sex-related bribes have also proliferated. Apart from longstanding factors such as obtaining employment, promotion or a work transfer, they now include: gaining Party membership; obtaining housing; facilitating business deals; avoiding legal punishment; and promoting smuggling operations (Feng 2001: 93–6). Consequently, there is a broad consensus that something has to be done about the phenomenon of sexual bribery and corruption in China, but the issue that remains to be resolved is the question of what constitutes the most appropriate response.

Conclusion Although there is a general agreement that the conduct of government officials in present-day China needs to be made more transparent and accountable, there is a lack of consensus over how the phenomenon of sex-related bribery and corruption should be governed. Those who advocate the criminalization of sexual bribery and corruption tend to focus on legal and judicial reform in the name of consolidating China’s recent shift to a ‘rule of law’. Conversely, those who oppose the criminalization of this phenomenon claim that it is essentially a moral issue, and therefore an inappropriate target of legally based governmental intervention. 174 Elaine Jeffreys In other words, while proponents of the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption contend that their turn to ‘law’ is a modern response to the emergence of new forms of criminality, opponents of such a proposal maintain that it is actually underpinned by traditionalist and backward forms of thinking (‘Chengzhi quanse jiaoyi mo bingji luantouyi’ 2000; ‘Xin huilu xianxiang’ 2000). What contributors to this ongoing debate have in common is an apparent inability to conceive of educative and other regulatory strategies that seek to persuade government officials to preventively comply with normative goals, rather than demanding compliance and relying on ‘after-the-fact’ punishment, via the extension of punitive criminal and administrative sanctions. After all, despite accusations that supporters of the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption are bounded by traditionalist, moralistic and punitive ways of thinking, there is a certain irony at work in the fact that opponents of this proposal are keen to see the ‘Maoist’ system of administrative sanctions extended, a system that is often condemned and contrasted unfavourably to a ‘rule of law’ on the grounds that it encourages arbitrary sentencing and ‘extra-legal’ forms of punishment (see the chapters by Li Yinhe and Zhang Heqing in this volume). Contextualized in relation to debates on sexual bribery and corruption, however, it appears that, while the extension of administrative sanctions to ordinary members of the general public is generally frowned upon, such a move is strongly supported when the professed aim is to control the abuse of power and privilege, or the exercise of bourgeois right, on the part of government officials. This reliance on ‘enforced-compliance’ and/or ‘after-the-fact’ punishment is premised not only on the popular understanding that corrupt government officials deserve ‘extra punishment’, but also on a fatalistic and biologically determined view of the inability of male government officials to exercise responsible self- policing with regard to women and sex. A common argument here is that when it comes to sex-related bribery and corruption, male government officials who are otherwise ‘incorruptible’ are soon corrupted, a view which implicitly or explicitly reinstates traditional, derogatory conceptions of female sexuality as predatory (Zhao Chengliang 2001). One way of illustrating this contention is to note that government officials in senior management positions in Sichuan Province have been banned temporarily from employing female receptionists, guards and drivers — that is, women who usually work in close physical contact with male officials, in what constitutes yet another attempt to halt potential problems such as sexual bribery and corruption and instances of sexual harassment (Huang 2003). While attracting some public sympathy as a proactive measure designed to stem corruption and sexual harassment, the Sichuan government’s decision to temporarily ban male government officials from employing certain female personnel has quite obviously been condemned for promoting gender discrimination and contravening China’s labour laws and Constitution (Zhou 2003). However, apart from gesturing towards the general need for more open and transparent government, critics of this measure have failed to come up with any other practical alternatives. They simply state that the problem of sex-related bribery and corruption is not amenable to drastic or quick legal solutions, and that Sex-related bribery and corruption 175 government officials require a more concrete code of ethics than that provided by the discourse of socialism (ibid.). Given the divisive and inconclusive nature of such debate, it is difficult to ascertain how the phenomenon of sex-related bribery and corruption might be governed in future years. But one thing is certain. The ongoing debate over how best to regulate corruption and the trading of power and sex can only contribute to new specifications of what constitutes ‘good governance’ and the appropriate range of sexual behaviours in present-day China.

Notes 1 Chen Xitong was the former Mayor and Communist Party Secretary of the city of Beijing. In 1998, he was sentenced by a Chinese court to 16 years imprisonment on charges of corruption and dereliction of duty. At that time, Chen was the most senior Communist Party official to be jailed for such crimes. His public trial coincided with the introduction of the PRC’s revised Criminal Law of 1997, and signified a new understanding that everyone is equal under the ‘rule of law’. 2 I place the term ‘hostess’ in citation to mark its imprecise nature as a translation for the Chinese term sanpei xiaojie. In Chinese language writings, the term sanpei xiaojie refers to a woman who acts as a paid companion for a man in three main ways, and whose defining activities primarily occur in public entertainment and leisure venues. However, the ‘three activities’ that comprise sanpei have been variously defined. Discussed in relation to the kinds of activities that occur within karaoke/dance venues, the term refers to the notion that some women will talk, sing and dance, with a man in return for material gifts or financial compensation. At other times it is taken to mean that such women will talk, smoke and drink, with a man in return for financial recompense. In other contexts, it refers to women who offer their services in health, hairdressing and beauty centres, and women who accompany men to eat at restaurants, to watch a film at the cinema, or to swim at the beach, in return for material or financial compensation. By other definitions, however, sanpei activities invariably involve sexual services of some form. This understanding of sanpei is sometimes dubbed duopei (accompanying in many ways) and refers to a woman who offers a man ‘extra’ (read sexual) services in return for material gifts or financial recompense (Fan 1994: 82–6). 3 The term ‘bureaucratic entrepreneur’ is used by Lance Gore (1999: 30) to refer to those ‘party-state officials who are directly engaged in business activities and other activities aimed at promoting economic expansion’. Unlike cadres under the pre-reform command economy, who were primarily responsible for implementing the state plan and other party directives, bureaucratic entrepreneurs are expected to perform their political duties and take initiatives in the marketplace.

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Wang Lei and Liu Ke (2000) ‘Xing huilu yueyan yuelie, faxue zhuanjia huyu lifa zhicai’ [The more sex-related bribery and corruption develops the stronger it becomes: lawyers appeal for legal punishments], Qingnian shixun, 14 December. Wu Yaonong (2000) ‘Chengzhi “xing huilu”’ [Punishing sex-related bribery and corruption], Zhongguo qingnian bao, 13 December. Xie Donghui (2003) ‘Jianlun xing huilu fanzui lifa’ [A brief discussion on the criminalization of sex-related bribery and corruption], Anhui lüshi wang, www.ahlawyer.com.cn/ kanwu/2003/lx2/more.html 29 May (accessed 8 October 2003). 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Zhao Chengliang (2001) ‘Tanguan nanguo nüren guan’ [Corrupt officials find it difficult to get past women], Fazhan daobao, 23 January. Zhao Jianmei (1994) ‘Manhua “chi he wan le quan baoxiao”’ [An informal discussion: ‘eat, drink, play, and ask for complete reimbursement’], Dashidai, 6: 35. Zhi Gang (2001) ‘Kankan gudai de xing huilu’ [Sex-related bribery and corruption in traditional China], Renmin fayuan bao, 18 January. ‘Zhifa renyuan baoyang “sanpei” yishenshifa diudiao “wusha”’ [Law enforcement officials who keep ‘hostesses’ to lose their ‘posts’ for life] (1999) Renmin ribao, 21 January. Zhong Qingbao (2000) ‘“Xing huilu” heshi ruzui [When will ‘sex-related bribery and corruption’ be treated as a criminal offence?], Renmin ribao, 20 December: 9. Zhou Xiaozheng (2003) ‘Fengsha nümishu weifa dui ren de zunyan jidu bu zunzhong’ [The practice of banning senior government officials from employing female receptionists is illegal: it shows a disregard for human dignity], News.sohu.com, 17 July. Index

abortion 29, 117 brothels 15, 140, 142 Adam and Eve Healthcare Centre 13, 125–6, Bureau of Civil Affairs 67–8 130–2 administrative punishments 83 Cao Xiukang 159 administrative sanctions, arbitrary nature of cell of society 47, 50–1 92–4 censorship 113 adolescent education 113 Central Commission for Discipline Inspection 162 in reform era 105–8 chastity 44 adult ratings 57 Chen Chengwen 143 adultery laws 51 Chen Xiaoyu 131 advertising laws 128 Chen Xitong 160 AIDS see HIV/AIDS children, sexuality of 26 All-China Women’s Federation 50, 69, 162 China Statistical Handbook 126 Altman, Dennis 1 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 2–3, 6–7, 14, An Dun 103, 119 45–6, 82 anal sex 30 disciplinary power 4 ancestor worship 28 discipline regulations 168 Ann Summers 135 ongoing political legitimacy 4 anti-yellow campaigns 52–3, 56 Chinese Encyclopedia for Sexology 130 Chinese Sexology 129–30 Bakken, Børge 48, 106 Chinese Sexology Association (CSA) Barmé, Geremie 104 124, 129–30 Beijing, gay culture 44 Chinese Supreme Court 83 Beijing Faction 163–9 Christianity 27 Beijing Life Guide Service Centre 13 citizenship Beijing Medical University and People’s and sexual citizenship 8–12 Hospital Medical Equipment Department 131 Chinese conceptions 13 Beijing University Centre for Women’s Law civic discourse 103 Studies and Legal Services 70 liberal conceptions 12 Beijing Youth Daily 111 Western conceptions 105 bigamy 9 civic participation 12 biochemical solutions 134 class revisionism 84 biomechanical aids 134 cohabitation 9, 51 bisexuality 102 commercial sex 8, 37, 54, 126 Braverman, Amy 5 campaigns against 143 bribery communist repression of sex 3 and corruption 16, 160 computer assisted surveys 21 use of term 159 concubinage 9, 32, 44, 46 see also sex-related bribery and corruption Condom Nation: Blind Faith, Bad Science 130 180 Index conjugal harmony 52 ethnographic research 11, 117 consensual adult sex 10, 50–1 Euramerica consumer revolution 43 as unified site of modern freedoms 1–2 consumerism 13 sexual politics 1–2 contraception 29, 126 Evans, Harriet 3, 106, 141 corruption 16, 160 extra punishment 174 police 14 extramarital affairs 29, 35, 37, 49, 51, 64, 69 see also sex-related bribery and corruption extramarital sexual activities 29 criminal behaviour 96 Criminal Law 3, 10, 16, 49, 57, 83, 127, 142 Falungong organization 56 Criminal Law 159–60, 164 family Criminal Law Research, Jiangsu Province biological analogy 49 Seminar on 159, 161 conventional conceptions 25–6 criminal prosecution 50 stability 49, 52, 77 criminalization 17, 62 violence 9 legal proponents 167 Family Matters 113–17, 121 sex-related bribery and corruption 159–63, Family Planning Committee 126 166–70, 174 Farrer, James 11–12, 102, 131 cross-dressing performance troupe 88 female premarital sex 22 cultural market 44, 55 Female sexual service providers 14, 139–58 cultural products 55–6 exploitation of 151 Cultural Revolution 3, 27–8, 31, 43, 65–6, financial independence 68–9 83–4, 112, 170 foreign culture, exposure to 45 homosexuals 86 foreign influences 52 cultural transformation 45 Foucault, Michel 2, 50, 104 culture and morality 47 free-choice marriage 9 free sex 33 dating 11, 106, 108–9 Decision on Strictly Forbidding the Selling and ganqing 111, 121 Buying of Sex 142, 165 gay culture, Beijing 44 Decisions on the Punishment of Crimes gay theorists 2, 8 of Smuggling, Manufacturing, Trading, gender and Disseminating Obscene Products 142 blindness 8 Deng Xiaoping 2, 28, 36, 43, 170 equality 35, 62, 78 deviant sexual conduct 2 rights 78 Dikötter, Frank 7, 52 Gilmartin, Christina 67 divorce 5, 8–9, 29, 51, 62–81 Government action 7–8 and housing 70 government intervention 8 experiences of litigants 71–5, 77–8 government officials, conduct of 173 financial and emotional setbacks 70 Grewal, Inderpal 1 see also Marriage Law Gringrich, Newt 102 domestic violence 9, 51, 78 group sex 50 drug addiction 7 Guangdong Adult Goods Market 124–7, 137 Dutton, Michael 104 Guomindang 45–6 economic reform 9, 12, 28, 31, 36–7, 43, Healthcare and Medical Products Specialist 82, 170, 172 Committee 129 and women’s status 63–4 healthcare centres 125 elite culture 47, 55 Heart of a Young Woman, The 56 enforced-compliance 174 hedonism 58 Engels, Freidrich 14, 156 Hershatter, Gail 4, 104, 120 Enlightenment 48 high-school love 108–10 Entertainment Regulations 144, 147 HIV/AIDS 1, 15, 58, 98, 141, 149–50 Erwin, Kathleen 4, 104 Hobbes, Thomas 103 Index 181 homosexual identity 94–9 Lauman, E. 26 homosexual rights 94–9 law enforcement 8 promotion of 97, 99 Law of the People’s Republic of China Against radical position on 98 Unfair Competition 165 toleration 96–7 legal aid 78 homosexuality 10–11, 82–101 legal education programmes 78 administrative sanctions 84–5 legal reforms 3 ambiguous status 83 legal system 3, 10 between consenting adults 83 lesbian theorists 2, 8 Cultural Revolution 86 Li Weisha 69 extra-legal sanctions 82 Li Yanping 135 group tactics 87 Li Yinhe 10, 50–1, 58, 103, 139 legal and other interpretations 82–3 liberal conceptions of citizenship 12 legal status 11 libido 37, 40 police action and fear of public exposure Locke, John 103 10, 86–92 love political organisation 99 and marriage, changing relationship problems facing 99 between 31–2 regulation, Maoist period 83–6 and sexuality 6, 34–5, 113 theory of three don’ts 95 concept of 32 see also same-sex love traditional conceptions 31 Honig, Emily 3 valorization over sexual love 34 hooliganism 83, 85, 94 Western-style concept 31, 34 hostesses 169, 173 housing and divorce 70 McMillan, Jo 13–14, 119, 124 Huang Shiren 32, 46 magazines 128 human civilization, progress of 14 male attitudes and behaviour towards women 17 human rights 1, 8–13, 103 Mao Zedong 2, 170 Human Sexual Response Cycle 132 Maoist period 3, 15, 48, 54, 56, 82–6, 171 marginalized groups 143 idealism 54 marital rape 78 Industrial and Commercial Administration marital relationship 6 Bureau 56 market economy 9, 12, 31, 54, 62, 64, 77, 112 inflatable dolls 135 market pressures 13 information revolution 43 marketing of sexual stories 117–20 inheritance laws 32 marriage 5, 25, 30, 62–81, 118 internal migration 62 and love 31–2, 37 International Education Foundation changing relationship with sex 33–4 (IEF) 130 stability 77 international markets 8 Marriage Laws 5–7, 9, 31–2, 46, 50–1, 62, internet 112–13, 120 64–8, 75–7, 162, 165 intimate citizenship 102–3 marriage services 118 intimate matters 111–13 Marx, Karl 156 Marxism 14–15, 48 Jeffreys, Elaine 1, 16–17, 159 masculine bias 10 Jia Chunjiang 106 masturbation 30 Jiangsu Province Seminar on Criminal Law May Fourth Movement (1919) 25, 31, Research 159 34, 47 Jin Weidong 16, 159–62, 165 media reports 2, 5–6, 28, 32, 36, 112, 141–4, Jordan, Ann 71 160, 162, 172 Mei Lanfang 88 Kang Shaokui 135–6 migration of women 63–4 Kaplan, Caren 1 mistress keeping 32–3, 44, 46, 162, 167 KKK 96 moral corruption 58 182 Index moral crimes 160 primary life cycle 5 moral decadence 46 clarifying the role of 36–40 moral judgement 50 concept of 24–8 moral pronouncements 48 influence of changes in 37 moral righteousness 47 influence of transformations 37 moral virtue claims 46 micro-level transformations 37 morality 54 organization of 28–9 and culture 47 representation of 26 Mu Zimei 35, 103–4, 113, 121 sexual implications 27 traditional 28, 31–2, 34 Nanlu 888 damp towel 134 transformations in 21–42 National Bureau of Statistics 168 prostitution 6–8, 14–15, 17, 46, 107, 139–58 National People’s Congress 51, 167 decision on strictly forbidding the selling New China 35, 45–6 and buying of sex 142, 165 New York Times, The 113 banning 139–41, 143 News Publication Bureau 56 cases of swindling 152 NGOization of social movements 1 controls 140 nuclear families, incidence of 30 countering the ban 151–4 decriminalization policy 139–40 obscene products 127 difficult customers 151 Old China 46 eradicating 142 one-child family policy 28–30 history of 141–3 one-night stand 33 legalization 140 Open Door Policy 2–3, 5, 14, 28, 31, 36, media exposure 144 43, 84, 170 post-1949 understanding of 156 Open-door sexuality 5 protection from third parties 154 openness of sex 22 regulation 139–58 oral sex 30 special services 152 orgasm 35, 132–3 working conditions and earnings 148–51 Provincial Provisional Rules on Banning Pan Suiming 5–6, 21, 26, 53, 58, 77, Selling and Buying of Sex 142 139, 156 public-funded police entertainment 169 Parish, William 26 Public Security Bureau 53, 56 party-state authorities 45 Public Security Regulations 49 Pearl River Delta 44 penile attachments 132 Qing Dynasty 31, 166 penile vacuum pump 133 Qiong Yao 108 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 2–4, 6–7, queer theorists 2, 8 21, 43 pimps 15 radical feminists 17 Plummer, Kenneth 102–4 Real Man Helping Hand 132 policing of virtue 44–9, 52–7 Red Spider Appealing Leather Adornment political liberalization 44 Design Centre 137 politics 43–61 reform as revolution 43 and sex 48–9, 58 Regulations Concerning the Management of of sexual story-telling 102–23 Public Places of Entertainment 143 popular cultures 47 repressive hypothesis 2 pornography 6, 8, 17, 50, 52–7, 115, 127 romantic love see love pregnancy 29, 116 Romeo and Juliet 114–15 premarital chastity 107 Ruan, Fangfu 3 premarital sex 6, 11, 30, 37, 49, 102, rule of law 8, 82, 86, 167, 171 111, 120 rule of man 171 premature love 11, 105–6 Rules Regarding the Detention and Education pre-sexual revolution China 27 of People Who Sell and Buy Sex 142 Index 183 same-sex love sexual behaviours (Continued) ambiguous status of 95 normative view 50 legal status 95, 97–8 seriousness in 28 victims of intimidation and deception 89 social acceptance 30 with minors 83 social organization 24 see also homosexuality sexual choreography 133 saohuang 47 sexual citizenship 8–12, 102–23 school system 108–11 use of term 12, 103 sex and sexuality Western discussions 104 absence of Western-style conceptions in sexual commodities 13 pre-sexual revolution 25 sexual conduct and government 4 nature of 22 and love 6, 34–5, 113 regulation 62 and politics 48–9, 58 sexual conservatism 47 buying and selling sex 142–3 sexual culture 43 conceptualizing 24–8 and its governance 5–8 history of 27 micro-level regulation 44 openness of 22 sexual decadence 46 regulatory norms 25 sexual dissidents 121 repression 27 sexual equality/inequality 35, 46 status in mainstream society 22 sexual experience, changes in 23 use of term 24 sexual freedom 58 sex education 11 sexual health 13, 124–38 sex for pleasure 28–31, 37, 135–7 aids to 131–5 sex for reproduction 28–31 sexual information 116 sex negativity 2 sexual intercourse among students 107 sex products 128, 131 sexual intimacy 44 sex-related bribery and corruption 159–78 sexual knowledge 115 criminalization 159–70, 174 sexual liberalization 44, 58 difficulty in obtaining evidence 167 sexual licentiousness 58 future government 175 sexual maturation 26 pervasive nature of 173 sexual morality 46, 106 proliferation of 171 sexual pleasure, manufacturing goods for 135–7 regulation 170 sexual positions 30 spread of 172 sexual relations sex-sector capitalists 15 legitimate outlet 49 sex-sector consumers 15 nature of 22 sex-shop industry 13–14, 124–38 steadfastness in 28 management problems 129–30 sexual revolution 4–6, 36–7 negotiating ambiguous legal boundaries 127–8 and primary life cycle 34 selling medicalized sex 130–1 conclusions relating to 40 staff 127, 131 future research 41 sex-tools 127 indications of 62 sex-toys 127 origins and nature 21–42 sex trade and its governance 12–18 sexual rights 104, 120–1 sex-workers 49–50, 54 sexual satisfaction 37, 40 sexual activity, knowledge of and types of 22 sexual scripts 37, 40 sexual asceticism and conservatism 46 sexual services 38, 49 sexual autonomy, women’s rights to 104 sexual standards 11 sexual behaviours sexual story-telling and relationships 21 marketing of 117–20 changes in nature of 22 politics of 11, 102–23 female respondents 39 sexually transmissible infections (STIs) 2, male respondents 38 14–15, 131–2, 149–50 184 Index Shaanxi Province 57 Washington Post 111 Shanghai Baby 35, 102–3, 113 Wei Dong 51 Shanghai Faction 163, 166, 168–9 Wei Hui 35 Shanghai Television 113 Wei Lan 116–17 Shi Chengli 134 Wenzhou Lover Health Product Company Sichuan government 174 14, 135–6 Sigley, Gary 3, 6–7 Western notions of sexual liberation and sexual single-parent family 26 freedom 35, 44–5 smuggling activities 168 Western studies of sexuality 1–2 Soaring High Sexual Function Convalescer White Haired Girl, The 46 133–4 women social change 43 attitudes of 6 social class 37, 40 changing attitudes towards sex and love 35–6 social controls 12, 40 commodification 64 social decadence 52 male attitudes and behaviour towards 17 social discrimination 96 migration 63–4 social engineering 48 relocation 64 social factors 37, 40 reverse migration 64 social stability 47 sale of 64 Social Survey Institute 162, 166 status of 29, 62–4 social transformation 45 vulnerable to male exploitation 63 socialist ethics 165 women workers 70 socio-sexual relations 13 Women’s Federation 65 sodomy 83–5 women’s liberation, socialist understanding of spirit of Yan’an 43 prostitution 156 spiritual sustenance 54 women’s rights 10, 65–8, 78, 104 State Auditing Administration 169 Women’s Rights Law 66, 71 story-telling see sexual story-telling women’s sexuality 22 students, sexual intercourse among 107 Woo, Margaret 8–10, 62 suicide 84 Wu Wei 136 summer-break trial marriages 112 Sun Myung Moon 130 Xiaohong 109–10 Supreme People’s Court 66, 71 xieyi system 67 surveys, computer-assisted 21 xing huilu 16, 159, 164 Xiong Bingchun 143 taboo sexual topics 112 Xu Bin 169 talking sex and sexuality 1–20 Tang Dynasty 166 Yang, Mayfair 27 Taoism 28, 33 Yang Qianxian 167–8 television 57 Yang Wenzhi 124 yellow industries 48, 54, 57 Unification Theological Seminary 130 Yin 33 youth sex culture 109 venereal diseases 7 Yufan Hao 171 Viagra 129, 133 virginity 44 Zhabei District Court 68–71 virtue, policing of 47, 52–7 Zhang Erjiang 16, 160 vulgar culture 55 Zhang Heqing 14–15, 32, 139 Zhao Dengju 161, 163 Wang Aili 26 Zhao Ping 162 Wang Ruoxi 103 Zhongyu, Ren 125–6